I'^-'i^ ^ >^-_,. mw^M^ "4^ *^ ■T'^^ 1 ^ ^'^''^ ^3 i«.- • It J'f iC|F -^^ ^& ml.M -r^^^ 1^" '. ^ * ..?V HI ?iK ^ **' ■iV'' 1^ Br J -'•. - 8 i^^ wWmm Impressionism and the French ^\ PREYED. ^\ PUB. AT ^\ $49.95 \ \ \ \ \ \ \ A DAY IN THE COUNTRY: IMPRESSIONISM AND THE FRENCH LANDSCAPE By Richard R. Brette/l, Scott Schaefer, Sylvie Gache-Patin, and Fran^oise Heillmin A Day in the Country, with its wealth of exquisite color- plates, is a glorious armchair excursion into the world of the French Impressionists. But it is also a newly opened window on what the great artists who created these masterpieces were trying to achieve. This is the first volume to approach Impressionist landscapes not merely as exaltations of physical beauty but as modem statements of important principles — artistic and social. The great new network of railroads that expanded the horizons of even the poorest city dweller, and the resulting new interaaions of city and country life, are part of this absorbing chronicle. Monet, Cezanne, Kenoir, Seurat, Sisley, Gauguin, Manet, Signac, Pissarro — these and other major painters are represented here in works that include the cream of the world-famous collection of French Impressionist landscapes that millions of visitors have enjoyed the femed Jeu de Paume Museum in Paris. These, together with a magnificent array of works fix)m The Art Institute of Chicago and other important museums and private coUeaions around the world, make A Day in the Country an extraordinarily vivid and varied panorama. A special essay on the landscape in French nineteenth- century photography makes a significant contribution to the literature on this most enchanting of art subjects. About the Authors Richard R. Brettell is Searle Curator of European Painting at The Art Institute of Chicago. Scott Schaefer is Curator of European Painting at The Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Sylvie Gache-Patin and Fran^oise Heilbrun are Cura- tors at the Musee d'Orsay, Paris. Index, bibliography. 228 illustrations , including 154 plates in full color w '>. '™™^SH??E.. 4W \ft' ■"Pr^''^Wf?r3l^^ 'i-x'' S<(S' :ji(II^- ■sS" ■-■-■>i!i--J '-■'liL ^^mm^- V*i A DAY IN THE COUNTRY Impressionism and the French Landscape Los Angeles County Museum of Art The Art Institute of Chicago Reunion des Musees Nationaux in association with Abradale Press Harry N. Abrams, Inc., Publishers, New York Exhibition Itineran': Los Angeles Counti' Museum of Art June 28-Septemher 16, 1984 The Art Institute of Chicago October 23, 1984-Ianuary 6, 1985 Galerfes Nationales d'Exposition du Grand Palais, Paris February 8-April 22, 1985 Edited by Andrea P. A. Belloli Designed by Dana Le\'^" Sections III/3, III/6, III/8, and V translated from the French by Michael Henry Heim. Except where noted, all other translations are by the authors of the sections in which they are included. The Checklist of the Exhibition was prepared by Paula-Teresa Wiens, and the Bibliography by Mary-Alice Cline. Typeset in Sabon by Continental Typographies Inc., Chatsworth, California. Display type and initials set in Lutetia by Flenry Berliner's Typefoundry, Nevada City, California. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A Day in the country: impressionism and the French landscape, p. cm. "Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the .^rt Institute of Chicago, Reunion des musees nationaux in association with Harry N. Abrams, Inc., Publishers, New York." Contributions by Richard R. Brettell and others. Reprint. Originally published: Los Angeles, Calif.: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1984. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 0-8109-8097-5 1. Landscape painting, French. 2. Landscape painting— 19th century — France. 3. Impressionism (Art) — France. 4. France in art. I. Brettell, Richard R. II. Los .\ngeles County Museum of Art. III. Art Institute of Chicago. IV. Reunion des musees nationaux (France) [ND1356.5.D39 1990] 758'.144'0944074-dc20 90-33195 CIP Front cover: Claude Monet, Flowering Garden, c. 1866 (no. .8); back cover: Paul Gauguin, The Roman Burial Ground at Aries, 1888 (no. 133) Illustrations © 1984 Los Angeles County Museum of Art, unless otherwise indicated. Catalogue first published in 1984 by the Los .\ngeles County Museum of Art. This 1990 edition is published by Harry N. .\brams. Incorporated, New York. A Times Mirror Compan\'. .Ml rights reserved. No part of the contents of this book may be reproduced without the written permission of the publishers. Printed and bound in Japan Contents Lenders to the Exhibition Foreword Preface Acknowledgments Contributors to the Catalogue List of Maps I. Impressionism in Context II. The Impressionist Landscape and the Image of France III. A Day in the Country L The French Landscape Sensibility 2. The Cradle of Impressionism 3. The Urban Landscape 4. Rivers, Roads, and Trains 5. Pissarro, Cezanne, and the School of Pontoise 6. Private and Public Gardens 7. The Fields of France 8. Impressionism and the Sea 9. The Retreat from Paris IV. Impressionism and the Popular Imagination V. Appendix: The Landscape in French Nineteenth-Century Photography Checklist of the Exhibition Bibliography Index Trustees and Supervisors Richard Brettell and Scott Schaefer Richard Brettell 8 9 10 11 12 13 17 27 Scott Schaefer 53 Richard Brettell 79 Sylvie Gache-Patin 109 Scott Schaefer 137 Richard Brettell 175 Sylvie Gache-Patin 207 Richard Brettell 241 Sylvie Gache-Patin and Scott Schaefer 273 Scott Schaefer 299 Scott Schaefer 325 Franqoise Heilbrun 349 363 368 371 375 Lenders to the Exhibition Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo The Art Institute of Chicago Birmingham City Museum and Art Gallery The Brooklyn Museum Cincinnati Art Museum Ralph T. Coe The Currier Gallery of Art, Manchester The Detroit Institute of Arts Armand Hammer Collection The High Museum of Art, Atlanta Indianapolis Museum of Art The J. Paul Getty Museum, Malibu The Joan Whitnev Payson Gallery of Art, Westbrook College, Portland John G. Johnson Collection, Philadelphia Museum of Art Mrs. Lyndon Baines Johnson Josefowitz Collection, Switzerland Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth Los Angeles County Museum of Art The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York The Minneapolis Institute of Arts The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts Musee d'Orsay, Galerie du Jeu de Paume, Paris Musee d'Orsay, Palais de Tokyo, Paris Musee Marmottan, Paris Museum of Art, Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence Museum of Fine Arts, Boston The National Gallery, London National Gallery of Art, Washington National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh Philadelphia Museum of Art The Phillips Collection, Washington The Phillips Family Collection Portland Art Museum Mr. and Mrs. A. N. Pritzker The Santa Barbara Museum of Art The St. Louis Art Museum Shelburne Museum Lucille Ellis Simon Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton Southampton Art Gallery Union League Club of Chicago Hal B. Wallis Mrs. Arthur M. Wood Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven Several Anonvmous Lenders Foreword It is with great pleasure that the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Art Institute of Chicago, and the Reunion des Musees Nationaux, Paris, join in presenting A Day in the Country: Impressionism and the French Landscape. This exhibition, which focuses on the development of a mod- ernist vision as it can be observed in the evolution of French landscape paint- ing, brings together a remarkable selection of artworks from all over the world. A unique loan from Paris combined with generous support from The Art Institute of Chicago forms the core of the exhibition. We are deeply indebted to these and the many other lenders for their contributions, without which this exhibition could not have been realized. In recent years a great deal of scholarly attention has been focused on what might be termed the "geography of Impressionism." Several studies have resulted in the precise identification of the Impressionists' landscape sites and have featured photographs of the painters' motifs side by side with reproductions of their paintings. To date, however, no major international exhibition has been organized to show the range and breadth of Impression- ist landscape and to place it in its broader context. A Day in the Country, which focuses on the iconography of Impressionism as a key to the social, economic, and ideological issues of the second half of the nineteenth century, is intended to fill this gap. We would like to express our gratitude to Richard Brettell, Curator of European Painting and Sculpture, The Art Institute of Chicago; Scott Schaefer, Curator of European Paintings, Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Sylvie Gache-Patin, Curator, Musee d'Orsay; and Franqoise Heilbrun, Curator, Musee d'Orsay, for their contributions to the catalogue and for their work on the organization of the exhibition and the selection of the paintings to be included. We would also like to thank Robert J. Fitzpatrick, Director, Olympic Arts Festival, for his ongoing support of the exhibition. A Day in the Country: Impressionism and the French Landscape has received major support from the IBM Corporation, for which we are extremely grateful. We also wish to thank the Los Angeles Olympic Organizing Committee; the Times Mirror Company, sponsor of the Olympic Arts Festival; the Associ- ation Franqaise d'Action Artistique; and The Consolidated Foods Founda- tion, the latter for its support of the Chicago showing. Finally, we acknowl- edge generous support from the National Endowment for the Arts and from the Federal Council on the Arts and Humanities, which provided an indem- nity to cover the foreign loans. Earl A. Powell III James N. Wood Michel Laclotte Director Director Chief Curator Los Angeles Counry Museum of Art The Art Institute of Chicago Musee d'Orsay Preface A Day in the Country: Impressionism and the French Landscape is one of the major cultural components of the 1984 Olympic Arts Festival. Of the more than 120 works on exhibit, roughly one third are on special loan from Paris and are not expected to travel again once they are installed in the new Musee d'Orsay. Thus their exhibition, or- ganized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in collaboration with The Art Institute of Chicago and the Reunion des Musees Nationaux, Paris, pro- vides an extraordinary opportunity- both for the people of California and for hundreds of thousands of Olympic visitors from around the world to view outstanding masterpieces by the major Impressionist artists in a unique context. The Los Angeles Olympic Organizing Committee wishes to express its appreciation to the three organizing museums who will host this superlative exhibition and to the Times Mirror Company as the official sponsor of the Olympic Arts Festival. We would also like particularly to thank Catherine Clement, Director, Association Franqaise d'Action Artistique, for her assist- ance in the creation of A Day in the Country. Robert J. Fitzpatrick Director Olympic Arts Festival 10 Acknowledgements Gratitude is expressed to the following individuals and institutions whose assistance and support have been invaluable in the preparation of A Day in the Country: Impressionism and the French Landscape: Luce Abeles; Hugues Autexier; Andrea P. A. Belloli; Genevieve Bonte; Wallace Bradway; Francois Braunschweig; Peter Brenner; Terry Brown; Mary-Alice Cline; Paula Cope; Corpus Photographique XIX^ CNRS-BN; Merle d'Aubigne; Ma- rie de Thezy; Anne Distel; Tom Fender; Hollis Goodall-Cristante; Gloria Groom Alia Theodora Hall; Katherine Haskins; Michael Henry Heim; Jacqueline Henry Frangoise Jestaz; Robert W. Karrow, Jr.; David Kolch; Anna Leider; William Leisher Timothy Lennon; Antoinette Le Normand-Romain; Francois Lepage; Dana Levy Gerard Levy; Bernard Marbot; Renee Montgomery; John Passi; Sylvain Pelly; Elvire Perego; Jean-Jacques Poulet-Allamagny; Jim Purcell; Larry Reynolds; Christiane, Roger; Anne Roquebert; Josiane Sartre; Samara Whitesides; Paula-Teresa Wiens; Gloria Williams; and Deenie Yudell. This exhibition and its catalogue are funded by a major grant from the IBM Corporation. Additional support has been received from the National Endowment for the Arts; the Association Fran^aise d'Action Artistique(Ministere des Relations Exte- rieures); the California Arts Council; and an indemnity from the Federal Council on the Arts and the Humanities. The exhibition is a part of the Olympic Arts Festival of the 1984 Olympic Games, sponsored by the Los Angeles Olympic Organizing Committee through the support of the Times Mirror Company. 999 11 Contributors to the Catalogue Richard Brettell r.b. Curator of European Painting and Sculpture The Art Institute of Chicago Sylvie Gache-Patin s. g.-p. Curator Musee d'Orsay, Paris Fran^oise Heilbrun f.h. Curator Musee d'Orsay, Paris Scott Schaefer s.s. Curator of European Paintings Los Angeles County Museum of Art 12 List of Maps Maps 3 — 8, all dated 1832, are reproduced courtesy of the Newberry Library, Chi- cago, from Nouvelles Cartes topographiques de la France, which was printed in Paris between that year and 1879 for the Depot de la Guerre. 1 (p. 30): France (Julie Jacobsoti) 2 (p. 31): Paris and Environs (Julie Jacob son) 3 (p. 56): Melun and the Forest of Fontainebleau (detail of sheet 65) 4 (p. 57): Paris and Environs (detail of sheet 48) 5 (p. 80): Bougival, Port-Marly, and Environs (detail of sheet 48) 6 (p. 138): Argenteuil, Neuilly, and Environs (detail of sheet 48) 7 (p. 176): Pontoise and Environs (detail of sheet 48) 8 (p. 274): Trouville and the Coast (detail of sheet 29) 13 # i^ ip«^ ^. V:'. _.c^s^^ ^ - ^ v'.;ftsrtT:"'^. i'^ \^ a^ I *-* ^. !*'»J «»' S^fv sir "t- •■=*^X/1-— 1^ e Faou Sa>ni-Bt:€-uc Samt-Br^c \ F I N' I S T E R E R I T T A N Y NORM A N D Y Hyeres \ lies O Radcdel-Es.aque d'Hycres O ^MEDITERRANEAN SEA Map 1. France. 30 A DAY IN THE COUNTRY Map 2. Paris and Environs. THE IMPRESSIONIST LANDSCAPE AND THE IMAGE OF FRANCE 31 The national landscape inaugurated in the seventeenth century and constructed through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was a landscape of communication through transportation (see below, III/4). As if in support of this idea, the gardens of Versailles, begun by Andre Le Notre for Louis XIV in 1668, were designated as a metaphor for the order and control of France through the mechanism of allees, or roads, and canals.'^ The great parterre with fountains just outside the Hall of Mirrors was — and still is — adorned not with classical deities or military trophies, but with allegorical statues of the principal rivers of France. Although it might seem strange to say, the gar- den landscapes of Le Notre in many ways predicted the landscapes of the Impressionists. His system of straight roads and canals linked the gardens of Versailles to the actual landscape of France, and the symbolic allusions in the sculpture and plantings he arranged to man's control of land, river, and sea were part of an underlying system of nationalist values present in Impression- ist landscape painting as well. The idea of landscape as "useful" nature, as nature tamed and controlled for the benefit of the nation, links the Impres- sionists and the ministers of Louis XIV. Although none of the painters were in any sense royalists, all of them felt themselves to be French to the core. Even Pissarro, a Danish citizen until his death in 1903, wanted to fight for the French during the Franco-Prussian War and expressed a longing to return to France during his self-imposed exile in England during that conflict. Not surprisingly, the nationalization of France had a profound effect upon the French landscape itself. In the seventeenth century a system of national highways was inaugurated so that travel through the countryside and among provincial capitals was made easier. These roads — raised above the ground for drainage, graded, and lined with rows of trees (fig. 1) — intro- duced a visual unity into the diverse regional landscapes, a unity based upon an image of collective movement and transportation (see below, III/4). This arterial system was joined during the eighteenth century to a network of ca- nals and improved natural waterways utilizing the rivers of France. Of all European nations, France is the best endowed with navigable rivers, and these^together with the canals which served to link them, thus creating an aquatic highway system — became the veins of France as the national high- ways were the arteries. The improvement of both networks continued into the nineteenth century. The progress of this national system of transport and communication can be traced even in the mapping of France. Inaugurated in the seventeenth century by the Cassini family, the detailed cartographic analysis of the countryside, which clearly recorded roads, canals, rivers, chateaus, towns, and even rural paths, was not completed (by the family's descendents) until the late eighteenth century. It was then replaced by a series of maps called the Nouvelle Carte topographique de la France, made for the Ministere de la Defense and finished only in 1879. This was joined by increasingly detailed, specialized maps concentrating on railroad lines or regions of particular importance to travelers. The nineteenth century was the great age of mass- produced maps, and a study of them makes it clear that the Impressionists were painting a landscape that was widely accessible both m actuality and to the armchair tourist. This process of unification through transportation was given extraor- dinary impetus in the nineteenth century by the invention of the railroad (see below, III/4). France, like England and the United States, gave herself over fervently to this new mode of transportation. Books and articles about rail- 32 A DAY IN THE COLINTRY >«?",s LOUVECIENNES — Routes de Ba:nl.Gc-rniain et de MarJy Fig. 1. Louveciennes — The routes de Saint- Gennain and de Marly, before 1910. Post- card. Private Collection, Louveciennes. roads appeared early in the nineteenth century, and, by the middle of the 1800s, the network of train lines was so large and complex that it had utterly transformed the nation. The first short line — between Saint-Etienne and Lyon — was inaugurated in 1828, and the first Parisian line (to Saint- Germain-en-Laye) in the mid-1830s. The government made a national com- mitment to the railroad in 1838 when the Chambre des Deputes under Fran- cois Arago voted to inaugurate separate railroad lines from Paris to Belgium, Le Havre, Bordeaux, Marseille, and Lyon. As the network of private and pub- He train lines increased, a Frenchman could move more quickly, cheaply, and easily from one place to another than ever before. The very accessibility of the countryside made possible by the railroad utterly changed the relationship between urban man and nature. As the century progressed, an increasing per- centage of the French people was able to travel, and it became possible for most provincial Frenchmen to visit the capital. Thus the railroad promoted the nationalization of France more than any law, speech, or idea and certainly more than any other mechanical invention.'"* The landscapes painted by the Impressionists abound in emblems of national order and solidarity reflecting these changes in the landscape of France. Trains, boats, carts, and carriages move easily on roads and rivers. Newly constructed bridges traverse both natural and man-made waterways. Urbanites stroll down country lanes. Peasants carry baskets of produce to market. Factories puff smoke and steam into cloud-filled skies. Fields of wheat ripen in the sun. All this unthreatening richness and serene beauty is presented as if immediately accessible to the viewer; the paintings' titles most often affirm that we are in the presence of a "real" countryside. Paradise — or something very close to it — has been made actual in these pictures. Yet they must be seen not only in terms of the modern aspects of France's nationalism, but also in terms of what might be called the French traditional world. Among the principal nationalist projects of the French people during the nineteenth century was the rewriting of French history. When viewed from the vantage point of the post-Revolutionary 1800s, France's history could no longer be described strictly as the dynastic chronicle of her kings THE IMPRESSIONIST LANDSCAPE AND THE IMAGE OF FRANCE 33 and their wars, advisors, and intrigues. Dominated by Jules Michelet, French nineteenth-century historians came increasingly to reinterpret past events as the history of "the nation" and its people. '^' Michelet's own work was a great nationalist project in which the achievements of ordinary men play an enor- mous role, and in which the French landscape is conceived as a vast natural theater for the actions of her people (see below, III/8). Yet most French historians were less radical in their aims. For apolo- gists of the old France, both royalists and religious zealots, a study of histori- cal events served to reconnect Frenchmen with their true past, a past which many considered to have been ruptured by the Revolution rather than to have found its climactic moment in that event.'* It was this essentially reactionary use of history that gave impetus to an extraordinary rise in the study of local chronologies and monuments in France during the nineteenth century. The number of historical societies and local museums rose astronomically during this period. Further, these institutions promoted a notion of la France historique, or historical France, that served very clearly as a conceptual framework for contemporary tourism. Pamphlets, guidebooks, and railroad publications were all but obsessed with the monuments of France's past greatness: her chateaus, cathedrals, ruined abbeys, important civic structures, and the like. Most nineteenth-century travel guides were illustrated with plates representing less the landscape than the architecturally — and histori- cally— important locales which gave it significance (fig. 2). The idea of la France historique fueled the fires of the national land- scape movement, and countless prints and paintings produced in nineteenth- century France record pre-Revolutionary sites about which one could read easily in various contemporary publications.''" The depth of the French national chronicle and the endurance of her people are themes alluded to in countless landscape paintings and prints made by artists varying in fame and quality from Franijois Blin to Jean-Baptiste Corot. Indeed, French landscapes painted in the 1800s, but before the Impressionists, indicate an essentially conservative ideology: in them, France survives and continues rather than changes. Aged forests, medieval bridges, cathedrals, and thatched cottages abound in landscapes painted by artists of the Barbizon school (see below, III/l). When painting the French landscape, the Impressionists explicitly — and persistently — avoided la France historique. Not until the 1890s did their landscape paintings feature architectural monuments of any age or signifi- cance, and the ecclesiastical structures which dominated so many French towns were often de-emphasized in, or even omitted from. Impressionist paintings of those places. More often than not, Monet, Pissarro, Sisley, and Renoir screened churches behind trees (nos. 13, 19), turned their backs on chateaus, and placed architectural monuments at the very edges of their com- positions (nos. 59, 63—64, 69). Their landscapes — nationalist though they may be — must be read in light of these omissions. Their rejection of such subjects has often been interpreted as a reaction against the Romantic sub- jects of the painters who had dominated the previous generation of French art, and this view is surely correct. Yet one must also see such pictorializing behavior in ideological terms. By rejecting historically important monuments as the central motifs of their landscapes, the Impressionists promoted a self- consciously modern or anti-historical doctrine which suggested that France was a nation that should look forward into the future for her inspiration and not backward at her glorious, if confused, past. One is never reminded that 34 A DAY IN THE COUNTRY Blanche of Castille and St. Louis lived in Pontoise during the Middle Ages when one looks at a Pissarro landscape of that town (see below, III/5), al- though every guidebook written during the nineteenth century dwelled on that very fact. The same applies to Monet's Argenteuil landscapes (nos. 39— 43) and to the many paintings made in the historically significant region around the Chateau de Marly by Pissarro, Sisley and Monet (see below, III/2). If the Impressionists rejected historical France, they were not so un- equivocal in their avoidance of her rural past. While chateaus of the rich — aristocratic or bourgeois — play a minor role in the iconography of Impres- sionist landscape painting, the modest dwellings of the rural poor are present in quantity, particularly in the work of Pissarro, Cezanne, Gauguin, Armand Guillaumin, and Sisley. (In fact, village scenes with and without figures occur in such abundance that they have been accorded a separate category here [see below, III/5]). When combined with the many hundreds of agricultural land- scapes painted by the same artists and by Monet (see below, III/7), they pro- vide evidence of a sustained investigation of the rural landscape that is as rich and significant as was that of Jean-Francois Millet, Corot, Charles-Franqois Daubigny, and Theodore Rousseau, all Barbizon painters (see below, III/l). Why did the Impressionists paint so many rural landscapes? The answer is not easy to discover. The tourists and travelers of nineteenth-cen- tury France, while not actively discouraged from visiting villages, were given few reasons to do so. In fact, most writers of the time were active in their dislike of traditional rural civilization. Honore de Balzac, whose novel Les Paysans was published in 1846, treated villages and their inhabitants as unremittingly stupid and narrow, and this view persisted in much of French rural fiction of the period, culminating in the publication of Emile Zola's La Terre in 1890. The novelist Edmond About, who lived near Pontoise and was a friend of Pissarro, went so far as to call the French village "the last fortress of ignorance and misery."'** If cities were sophisticated and, with all their corruptions, central to modern experience, villages were squalid and little more than tribal. There was, of course, another view. What might be called the rural pastorale was not altogether absent from French letters. George Sand wrote many elegiac rural novels, although even she was acutely aware of the great cultural gap that existed between the peasants of France and her modern urban readers.'' She wrote of the rural world as an antidote to urban civiliza- tion, and her view was shared by many writers. A typical popular text by an obscure physician. Dr. J.-B.-F. Descuret, entitled La Medicme des passions, ou les passions considerees dans lenr[s] rapports avec les maladies, les lois et la religion (1842), was concerned among other subjects with the modern dis- ease of urban ambition. Descuret's cure for this malady was country life, far removed from any city or large town. For him — indeed, for many writers throughout the nineteenth century in France — rural life was healthier and more moral than the life of the city because there were fewer pressures to progress, either financially or socially.-" In the midst of this dichotomous view of rural civilization, the Impres- sionist artists took pains to chart a middle course; their paintings of the tradi- tional rural landscape illustrate neither Balzac nor Sand. In fact, the one major generalization which can be made about Impressionist rural images is that they are resolutely mundane. Absent, for the most part, are the grand moments of the agricultural season, the violent storms followed by delightful Fig. 2. A. Normand (French), Neiv Railroad Line from Paris to Dieppe, from Pontoise to Gisors; Section between Pontoise and Gisors, n.d. Lithograph. Bibiiotheque Nationale, Serie Topographique, Va95, vol. IV, no. B16871. THE IMPRESSIONIST LANDSCAPE AND THE IMAGE OF FRANCE 35 Fig. 3. Jean-Frangois Millet (French, 1814- 1875), Spring, 1868-73. Oil on canvas. 86 x 111 cm. Musee du Louvre, Paris. Photo: Musees Nationau.x. calm, that formed such a basic part of the rural iconography championed by Millet (fig. 3). Instead, the rural landscapes of Pissarro, Gauguin, Guillaumin, and Cezanne are rich in ordinary visual incidents, each patch of cabbages, each pile of faggots, each roughly textured stone wall having been carefully observed and transcribed. The message of these pictures is clear: rural life was continuing to exist even in the modern world. Pissarro's rural workers walk stoically across the railroad tracks in Railway Crossing at- Patis, near Pontoise (no. 53); Cezanne's Bend in the Road (no. 72) represents a village almost outside time. The ideological underpinnings of this admission of rural life into Impressionist iconography can be understood most easily if contrasted with the notion of la France historique. The Impressionists demonstrated a clear preference for what might be called humble history, a history of the people, rather than the institutions, of France. When considered collectively, these paintings suggest a belief in both the essential value of the French population and the fact that the nation's civilization stands upon a rural base. In like fashion, Michelet's Le Penple (1846) is a portrayal of the French people in toto; it begins with an evocation of the peasant going to church on Sunday. Surely the strictly Republican notions of Michelet — and of the Impression- ists— accord well with the spirit of revolution in France. As the great modern French geographer Daniel Faucher has said, French history is "a long, accu- mulated history of our soil." For him, France has always been a rural nation and the labors of her fields have given her both equilibrium and prosperity throughout the centuries. ...Her cities have been the centers of her greatest and most brilliant achievements, but they are nourished by the silent workers of her fields.-' Indeed, Impressionist landscapes are virtually always peopled. Whether there are figures lolling in gardens or walking down paths, houses 36 A DAY IN THE COUNTRY set confidently in the fields or at the edge of cliffs, the human presence is always felt. We know that an empty field painted by Monet was planted and will be harvested by men (no. 103), and a deserted barnyard rendered by Cezanne is like a stage set before the play has commenced (no. 70). Theirs is most often a psychologically comfortable landscape, and the viewer rarely feels lonely because he is rarely alone. In this way as well, the Impressionists' landscape — and we might call it a social landscape — is almost everywhere at odds with the landscapes pre- ferred by the Barbizon school. Although there are peasants and vagabonds in paintings by Corot, Narcisse Virgile Diaz de la Peiia, and others, they are most often tiny and distant from the viewer, ignorant of his presence. He is — by implication — different from them. And many other landscapes — particu- larly those of Rousseau — are unpeopled. When in the Barbizon painters' for- ests, the viewer is far from civilization in a natural world of gnarled trees, rugged rock formations, and deep, hidden pools (fig. 4). Descriptions of these landscapes — particularly by the eloquent critic Theophile Thore — stress the isolation of the viewer in a silent landscape. Moved by a small picture by Corot, Thore wrote the following passage: It has at first the air of a confused sketch, but presently you feel the air gentle and almost motionless. You plunge into the diaphanous mist which floats over the river and which loses itself far far away in the greenish nuances of the sky at the horizon. You hear the nearly imperceptible noises of this quiet piece of nature, almost the shivering of the leaves or the motion of a fish on the top of the water.-- There are very few Impressionist landscapes that could support such a description. Being alone in the midst of nature was often given pantheistic mean- ings in nineteenth-century landscape descriptions; the viewer was thought to become a better or more moral person through his contact with isolated na- ture. He was able to think clearly, to rid himself of petty social concerns and vanities, to restore his spirit. As if in support of this idea, landscape painters like Corot, Daubigny, or Antoine Chintreuil were described as simple, moral people by their earliest biographers, and the time spent alone with nature, far from the haunts and commerce of man, was considered to be the reason for their goodness. In this way, nature was conceived as a world apart from man, as an equivalent, in a sense, of the modern concept of wilderness or virgin nature: the place of God. The Impressionists had a completely different concept of nature, as can be seen in their writings. They used the word frequently in their letters. To paint "before nature" for an Impressionist painter was not to wander for hours until one was alone in a landscape with no hint of the presence of man. Rather, it was to stand squarely in the easily accessible world and to paint it. These artists' idea of nature was the totality of the visible universe, a positivist view in which man and his works were seen as an integral part of a natural whole. Trains, boats, figures, factories, houses, fields, trees, piles of sand, machines — virtually every kind of form visible in the France of their time can be found somewhere in their landscapes. For Thore, Sand, and many intellec- tuals of mid-century France, nature was the world apart from man and his corruptions. For the Impressionists, nature was everything one could see. Thus, in pursuing their own notion of naturalism, the true Impression- ists avoided the isolated parts of France. They virtually never painted moun- tains. They refused to travel far to seek out the "sublime," preferring an inte- THE IMPRESSIONIST LANDSCAPE AND THE IMAGE OF FRANCE 37 Fig. 4. Theodore Rousseau (French, 1812- 1867), Clearing in the Forest of Fontaine- bleau, 1848-51. Oil on canvas. 142 x 197 cm. Musee du Louvre, Paris. Photo: Musees Nationaux. grated, balanced world in which various forms complemented one another. As such, the origins — whether conscious or not — of their landscapes are classical, and again the comparison between the campagne de Paris and the Roman Campagna must be made. Like Nicolas Poussin and Claude Lorrain in the seventeenth century, like Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes, Corot, and Jean- Victor Bertin in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the Impressionists conceived of the landscape as man's domain. It is no accident that the elderly Pissarro, for example, looked to Claude and the great French tradition as his major sources.-^ Without doubt the center of modernism in France was Paris. The cit>- not only accepted the industrial world and the future it would bring to humanity, it reveled m it. International exhibitions propagating the strength and inventiveness of French modernism took place in 1855, 1867, 1878, 1889, and 1900, and each embraced technolog>- and its parent, science, as fervently as possible. Trains, tractors, and machines for making clothes, bread, sugar, indeed almost everything, were exhibited and published widely in the popular press, with the result that nineteenth-century Frenchmen knew — or could know — almost as much about what was then new technol- ogy as Americans can today. The will to project into the future and thus to alter man's relationship to his past was an extraordinary feature of French nationalism in the nine- teenth century. There is no greater proof of this than the rebuilding of the capital and its suburbs (see below, III/3). Based upon the urban planning projects of Napoleon I, the process of modernizing Paris was a priority of every government in the 1800s, reaching extraordinary heights during the Second Empire (1852—70), when a coherent cit\' plan was created. Vast areas of the old city of Paris were leveled to the ground and rebuilt. People were forced out of neighborhoods which had stood for centuries, and large areas were carved out for new railroads, boulevards, and parks. It is probable that 38 A DAY IN THE COLrNTRY no other city in history has so totally — and violently — transformed itself in so little time. Indeed, destruction occurred at such a level during the Second Empire that it almost seemed as if the city was at war with itself — as then happened during the Commune. When walking in Paris today, we see the results of these labors — results which seem to us to have been worth all the effort — but we can forget too easily that Paris and its environs were being simultaneously destroyed and rebuilt with immediate human consequences throughout the period of the Impressionists. The literary work that really exemplifies the modernization of Paris and its suburbs was written by Flaubert's boyhood friend Maxime du Camp. Published in six hefty volumes between 1869 and 1876, just as the Impres- sionists were codifying their own pictorial attitude toward modern France, the book is entitled Paris, ses organes, sa fonction, et sa vie dans la seconde moitie du XIX siecle. Its analysis of the city was so different from that offered by any previous writer that its novelty can scarcely be overemphasized. Most earlier authors had treated Paris as a luxury center, the capital of world cul- ture, of the fine arts, and of the good life. The vast majority' of books about the city, whether novels, travel guides, memoirs, or histories, either waxed poetic about its monuments, restaurants, entertainments, and shops or con- demned it for its profound, if luxurious, decadence. If the campagne de Paris was conceived of as a classical landscape, the Rome most often equated with Paris was Rome just before the advance of the barbarians. Du Camp reversed all this with a book which tells the reader how the city worked and about its systems of transport, sewage, telegraphic communication, post, canals, mar- kets, and so on. The city for Du Camp was an enormous, quasi-organic machine which functioned because of the logic of its various organs and sys- tems of exchange. Its history was of little interest to him — it had already been written, he thought — and its culture less something willed by its people than the direct result of the conditions of life imposed upon these inhabitants by the machine of the city itself. If Napoleon III and his minister Baron Georges- Eugene Haussmann had attempted to rebuild Paris more or less from the ground up, Du Camp was their unofficial apologist in prose. For him, a city that worked properly was worth all the pain and destruction necessary to make it function efficiently. What is fascmatmg about the pamtmgs of Paris and its local and sur- rounding landscapes by the Impressionists is that, while we see the positive results of Baron Haussmann's labors, we very rarely see the destruction that led to them. Manet painted vacant lots on the rue Mosnier, Pissarro a con- struction site near Louveciennes, and Monet a bridge in Argenteuil being re- constructed after the Franco-Prussian War. Yet these paintings are remark- able chiefly because they are so rare in oeuvres which are among the largest in the history of art. More often than not, we see the new world of trains, straight roads, boulevards, boats, parks, fields, and factories as if these forms had always been in the landscape. There are few scars on the earth, few wounds of newness to be seen. Again, the selectivity of the Impressionist vi- sion must be remarked upon. It should be clear that Impressionism can be interpreted essentially as a healing art, an art which accepted the modern world easily and gracefully, as if rejecting, paradoxically, its very newness. Perhaps the most important modernizing change that occurred in the nineteenth century and that affected landscape painting was the widespread increase in travel. Although an important percentage of this travel can be called tourism and related to the mapping of France and building of rail- THE IMPRESSIONIST LANDSCAPE AND THE IMAGE OF FRANCE 39 roads, as we have seen, as well as to a general increase in the amount of leisure time made available to working people, a great deal of the movement that took place throughout the country — especially into and out of Paris — was commercial. The extraordinary increase in barge traffic changed the character of the Seine dramatically, and large train yards were constructed in the capital and its major industrial suburbs for the loading and unloading of livestock, machine tools, food, clothing, and any other goods coming in and out of the city. Commercial travel — the movement of goods and services — was more often pictured by the Impressionist artists and their friends than is commonly supposed, but less railroad than barge transport, particularly along the Seine. Pissarro, Cezanne, Sisley, Guillaumin, and Monet followed the leads of Johann Barthold Jongkind, Daubigny, and others who painted the industrial ports of Paris, particularly the Quai de Bercy in the eastern part of the city, as well as the port at Rouen and the immense channel ports of Le Havre and Douai. Pissarro even painted the peniches, or barges, that moved to and fro on the smaller Oise, which ran between the Seine and the system of canals in the industrially prosperous north of France. The motorized gnepes a vapeiir, or tugboats, and the barges seen in many Impressionist paintings of the industrial sections of the Seine were common sights on the river. If one wanted to create an exhibition devoted to shipping and river transport in France during the second half of the nineteenth century, one could do it with paintings by the Impressionists alone. Yet the kind of travel that is most important for an understanding of Impressionism is tourism. It is curious — and unfortunate — that a major his- tory of tourism in France has never been written, in spite of the vast bibliog- raphy and the huge mass of archival material available to researchers. One slim book, Gilbert Sigaux's Histoire de tonrisme (1965), makes a stab at this topic, which lies at the heart of Impressionism. The most valuable recent study of tourism. The Town's? by Dean MacCannell (1976), analyzes this phe- nomenon and its effects on human behavior as the key to an understanding of modernism and its peculiar forms of consciousness. The organization of lei- sure time away from home, the sightseeing of the tourist (fig. 5), has been brilliantly analyzed by MacCannell, and his identification of the tourist as the Everyman of modern culture lends even greater credence to the notion that the tourist-based landscape of Impressionism has a modernist/populist ico- nography. Tourism in France had existed for centuries before the railroad, and the excellence of the French highways was noticed often by eighteenth-cen- tury English tourists, many of whom drove through France on their way to Italy as part of the Grand Tour. The first widely accessible tourist guide avail- able to such people was written by a German named Flans Ottokar Reichard and published in French in 1793. Entitled Guide des voyageurs en Europe, this book was filled with practical information about inns, roads, restau- rants, and routes and assumed that the tourist would see what he wanted and ask the necessary questions about local sights of the natives. It was, in fact, the peasants in their local costumes who were the principal curiosities for late-eighteenth-century travelers, and Reichard's guide was illustrated with plates of picturesque individuals in regionally varied finery. Reichard's book was the beginning of a flood of literature, some of which was similarly narrow in focus, but a great deal more of which gave out information about local history, sights, side trips, population statistics, art 40 A DAY IN IHE COLINTRY Uc;;ill dc Oh. DtSP.'L ^\>jr Lull r-, ,,.1-1 Fig. 5. Jules Despres (French), Gathering the Grapes at Argenteuil, n.d. Lithograph from L'lllustration, 1877, p. 337. BibUotheque Nationale, Serie Topographique, Va95, vol. I, no. B16056. history, and the like. By the middle of the nineteenth century, tourist guides had become so bulky and so filled with densely printed prose that they resem- bled almanacs or encyclopedias more than the handy pocket guides envi- sioned by Reichard. The informed tourist, guidebook in hand, became a stan- dard feature in France and much of the rest of Europe during this period. When we look at landscape paintings produced at the time, we must never forget that they were painted by men and women who must be thought of as tourists, armed with information about everything they saw. The landscape the Impressionists visited and painted ran along the English Channel from Deauville to Etretat, down the Seine from Le Havre to Paris and out again along the train route mto the environs of the capital (maps 1-2, 4). This landscape was a discovery of the nineteenth-century tourist; many of the small towns, villages, and hamlets on the beach, along the Seme, or in the He de France sported hotels, inns, and restaurants, most of which were built and opened in the 1800s especially for such visitors. In fact, the area was almost a tired one by the 1860s and VOs, when the Impression- ists began to paint it in earnest.-"* Pissarro, on visiting Rouen in 1883, was struck by the number of views of this small provincial capital that had already been painted, drawn, and printed by earlier artists and was aware of the fact that his own renderings inevitably would be compared with the familiar prints by and after such artists as Richard Parkes Bonnington and J. M. W. Turner." Due to the enormous advances in mass-produced printmaking, the number of illustrated publications increased dramatically in the nineteenth century, and, for the first time in the history of Western man, a large percent- age of the population was what we today call visually literate. Many mass- produced images were travel views (fig. 6), and a considerable number of French artists made their living as travel illustrators. The drawings they made THE IMPRESSIONIST LANDSCAPE AND THE IMAGE OF FRANCE 41 ^ Fig. 6. Provost (French), The Inauguration of the Bougival Bridge, November 7, 1858, n.d. Lithograph. Bibhotheque Nationale, Serie Topographique, Va78, vol. I, no. B6763. i\iI<;iit.\iio\ liL t^-'\ were most often rapidly executed notations which were turned into finished views with standard buildings and figures by professional printmakers in Paris, with the result that such illustrations tended to have a suspicious same- ness of appearance. Yet, in spite of their relative inaccuracies, these popular topographical prints existed in such quantit}' that virtually every person in France was aware of the look of the rest of the country. If the artists who illustrated travel books were, with certain notable exceptions, untalented, the men and women who wrote the texts for such publications were considerably more gifted as a group. Writers from Sten- dhal, who published Memoires d'lin toiiriste in 1838, to Jules Claretie and Victorien Sardou wrote brilliant descriptive analyses of the towns, land- scapes, villages, and rivers of the north of France. The landscape descriptions written by the great masters of French realist fiction during this period were not only widely accessible, but of superb qualit)'.-'' Essays in mass-circulation journals as well as separately produced travel guides included discussions of the beauties of landscapes, the "meanings" of rivers, and the poetics of ham- lets. Authors, many of incredible refinement, tested their sensibilities en face de la motif, directly confronting their subjects almost as if they were pamters. Indeed, they wrote much better prose about actual landscapes than about landscape paintings, and the literature produced for tourists tends, in general, to be more interesting to read today than contemporary art criticism. There are countless passages in which the writer urges painters to depict a particu- lar landscape. Hence the artist acted as an alter ego or extension of the tour- ist. One anonymous author of the Guide de voyagetir siir les bateaux a vapeur de Paris au Havre{c. 1865)exhorted the paintersof France to travel the Seine, there to discover "all these delicious landscapes, all these islands, all these cliffs."-" On occasion the coincidence between a descriptive text in a guide- book and an Impressionist painting is so close that one can scarcely believe that the painter had not read the guide. 'VCTiile many earlier landscape paint- ers had considered themselves to be hermits, vagabonds, or itinerants, then, the Impressionists adopted the persona of the tourist. The effects of tourist travel were widely debated during the Impres- sionist period. In 1876, for example, the year of the second Impressionist exhibition, a modest young painter named Emile Michel gave a lecture to the Academic Stanislas with the rather grand title "Du paysage et du sentiment 42 A DAI' IN THE COUNTRY de la nature a notre epoque." Although not particularly novel, his thesis was clearly defined: that modern, urban man, living in crowded and changing conditions far from his rural origins, needed frequent periods of rest in the country and that landscape painting could provide temporary relief for the desperate urbanite. Michel was acutely conscious of the fact that modern France — in what he called "our age" — was very different from historical France. Most of these differences he lamented; he detested technology and the resulting material progress of man, whom he called "a docile servant of machines."'-'^ Yet he was more willing than most conservative critics to under- stand that nature and country life helped to restore an equilibrmm to indus- trial man, and he correctly interpreted the rise of both rural tourism and landscape painting as a direct result of the changes wrought on society by industrialism and urban modernism. Michel saw the countryside painted by the Impressionists — about whom he did not know in 1876 — as a hideous, modern countryside, and he wrote of Paris as a great animal devouring nature. It is certainly no accident that virtually every "ruined" landscape he mentioned was painted by the Impressionists: the coasts destroyed by beach towns, the fields scarred by train tracks, and the suburbs polluted by factories. By comparing Michel's prose and Monet's paintings, one can see instantly that where the former hated modernism and retreated to the unspoiled countryside near the forest of Fontainebleau to escape it, the latter accepted it with utter equanimity. For Michel, tourism was an element of modernism to be feared, though he acknowledged the necessity of escape from the city; for Monet, tourism was an essential way of life. A day in the country — boating, eating, walking, reading, or just sitting — was a profoundly social experience for Monet and his colleagues. We have already referred to the populated world of the Impressionists, and we can see now that it was most often populated with the tourists despised by reactionaries like Michel. By the middle of the nineteenth century there were almost as many kinds of temporary visitors to the countryside as there were natives. The ur- ban elite, whether aristocrats manque or bourgeois, kept large country estab- lishments and lived, or attempted to live, like grand seigneurs, surrounded by servants, tenants, sharecroppers, and whatever other subservient populations they could afford or control. Others, middle-class people, built small country properties, which they used on weekends and for summer vacations.-^ In fact, the huge increase in the construction of country residences during this period went hand in hand with a rise in private gardening (see below, III/6). Whether one possessed an enormous "park," as did Monet's friends and pa- trons the Hoschedes, or rented a small country property with an enclosed garden, as did Monet, Pissarro, and Manet, the cultivation of an ornamental flower garden was a priority. Books and magazines devoted to private gar- dening were produced throughout the period of the Impressionists. Some, like the Almanach du jardinier amateur, which commenced publication in 1870, catered to a middle-class audience, while others, like the luxurious Al- bums du paysagiste pour I'arrangement des pares et des jardins (1875), were written for the rich. This literature served to guide the Parisian in his creation of a temporary garden landscape for enjoyment on weekends and during the summer months. Here, too, the Impressionists followed the lead of what one might call the tourist class. Yet for the vast majority of urban petit bourgeois or working-class Frenchmen the country was accessible only for short periods of time. One THE IMPRESSIONIST LANDSCAPE AND THE IMAGE OF FRANCE 43 could rent a small property for a week or a month, stay in a hotel for a week- end, or, most commonly, go to the country for a single day. This latter activ- ity, charming and easy as it might appear in the paintings of the Impression- ists, was not very socially elevating. Indeed, the day trips of many of the more lowly characters in French Realist and naturalist novels figure significantly in such narratives. Rural tourism came to be considered a social equalizer. Tourism became even easier and cheaper as the century continued and the number of train lines increased. With greater competition among the var- ious private firms offermg transport, fares were lowered, and people of very limited means could easily afford a day trip out of Paris by the middle of the Second Empire. Indeed, statistics indicate that the 1850s were the great dec- ade of railroad construction in the environs of Paris, and conventional trains were joined by such inventions as the omnibus americain, or horse-drawn trolley (fig. 37), and other rail vehicles. Many of the private and semiprivate rail lines produced their own promotional material, and an entire species of travel literature arose to appeal to their newly defined clientele (see below, III/4). Perhaps the most important item of this new genre was the series of guides called Les Chemins de fer illustres. Produced for mass circulation, the guides cost as little as 25 centimes and could he purchased either singly or in sets. Each guide consisted of a four- to eight-page booklet covering a single train line (Paris to Argenteuil, Paris to Pontoise, or Paris to Fontainebleau, for example). Each included a linear rail map marked with the major roads near the stations and a text describing the railroad line itself, its history, and its construction, as well as the major sites to be seen from it. The text also alerted the tourist to the beautiful rural walks and historical sites one could see after leaving the train and mentioned restaurants and inns, where appropriate. Les Chemins de fer illustres appeared twice a month beginning in 1858, and many celebrated authors, including Alexandre Dumas fils and Claretie, wrote for it. It inaugurated a type of publication that was widely copied by private railroads and transport companies. Many promotional schemes rather like those used to lure people onto airplanes today also were widespread in the nineteenth century. Tourists could take advantage of such special arrangements as group or weekend rates, tickets with unlimited use for short periods of time, and the like, and ordinary Frenchmen came increas- ingly to see the world through the eyes of the writers hired by Les Chemins de fer illustres and its competitors. The first important general guidebook to the environs of Paris was written by the greatest nineteenth-century popular travel writer in French, Adolphe Joanne. His guidebook Les Environs de Paris illustres, organized on the basis of the newly developed railroad lines, was first published in 1856 and appeared in numerous later editions before being substantially rewritten and enlarged in 1872. If there is one book that proposed to systematize French tourism in the period of Impressionism, it was Joanne's guide. Writ- ten in clipped, efficient prose, his book tells the tourist about everything from village fairs to local eateries. It urges the intrepid traveler to take rural walks, describing how long they will take and the major sites to be seen. It talks about ruined abbeys, beautiful views, neglected public gardens, and hidden hamlets. It includes complete schedules of train arrival and departure times and of fares. So full of information is Joanne's guide that it would require a lifetime to complete the many diverse tours it describes. 44 A DAY IN THE COUNTRY ¥ig. 7. Renoir, Path through Tall Grass, fjC, *^' ^"i^'^tj^ "^"^ c. 1876-78. Oil on canvas. 60 X 74 cm. •^ -T^r^lr ■■ -^'^^^ Musee d'Orsay, Galene du Jeu de Paume, Paris. Photo: Musees Nationaux. What is fascinating about this book — and many others written before and after it — is that rural tourism was presented to their readers almost as a gourmet is presented with a wonderful dinner for consideration. There were the "main courses," major sites like Versailles or the view of Paris from Le Notre's terraces at Saint-Germain-en-Laye. Yet a perfect day in the country required visual hors d'oeuvres and desserts as well, and Joanne provided the tourist with suggestions for delightful promenades that would take him away from the "significant" monuments. Nothing was too humble to be examined by Joanne; he led Parisians up steep hillsides in anticipation of noteworthy vistas or through narrow rural paths to catch glimpses of grand chateaus. Joanne's landscape — and the landscape of all writers and illustrators of French- tourist literature — was a quintessentially public landscape. The tourist — whether on a train or a country path — was traversing a landscape which belonged, in a sense, to every Frenchman. Although this does not seem remarkable to us today, one must remember that travel was not only cum- bersome and difficult before the middle of the 1 800s, but that it also required passports and identity papers. Absolutely free movement for people of all social classes throughout the landscape (fig. 7) was something essentially new in this period. The fact that the French conquered their own countryside as tourists and landscape painters with such determination demonstrates the extent of their pleasure in this new freedom. Additional obstacles in their way were the travel restrictions imposed upon them during the Franco-Prussian War and the Commune. These factors must be remembered when we look at the delightfully accessible landscapes of the Impressionists or read the entic- ing prose of the guide literature which calls us out into the country. The freedom to go where one wanted, to wear what one wanted, to THE IMPRESSIONIST LANDSCAPE AND THE IMAGE OF FRANCE 45 eat out-of-doors, to be seen with whomever one wished — all these freedoms were extolled time after time in travel literature. If the idea of an entire life spent in a provincial town or county seat has been considered a form of self- imposed imprisonment by French writers since Balzac, a day or even a month in the country, spent in the company of one's dearest friends from Paris, has been treated with considerably greater enthusiasm. Flaubert celebrated the charming, if temporary, glories of the publisher Jacques Arnoux's country residence in the Parisian suburb of Saint-Cloud in L'Education sentimentale (1869), but disparaged the charms of the provincial hometown of his hero. If one felt confined in the tightly ordered provincial society of Nogent, one could be truly liberated in the transplanted urban society of Saint-Cloud. These freedoms of a country tourist were not universally admired, however. Indeed, the countryside frequented by urban visitors came increas- ingly to be seen as a place of sexual license, immorality, and intrigue. One travel writer, Emmanuel Ducros, in a charming book called Chemin de fer (1884), described with great care and subtlety the processes of seduction that took place in a train compartment, quoting a delightful song about a "con- versation with the eyes" that took place in a one such "padded cell." And the ever-moral Guy de Maupassant wrote scathingly in his novel La FetJime de Paul (1880) about the goings-on, sexual and financial, at the popular restau- rant in Bougival painted by virtually every one of the Impressionists, La Grenouillere (The Frogpond) (no. 14). Such literary passages were not at all rare during the second half of the nineteenth century and contrasted in every way with the notion of the countryside as a place of moral rejuvenation that was equally common during the period. The fact that Zola set the dramatic murder from his first major novel, Therese Raqiiin (1867), not in Paris, where the characters lived, but in the countryside, tells us a great deal about the actuality of vice imported to the suburbs. One writer of the time went so far as to say that the railroad and rural tourism had ruined the basic fabric of French society by weakening the bonds of regional and family life.^'' As we have seen, this negative view of the countryside, common enough in lit- erature, is rare in Impressionist painting. Although the connections between painting and the railroad are mani- fold and fascinating, strangely enough there is not a single major book or essay which deals clearly and specifically with these issues. Perhaps the most amusing — and, in a sense, important — discussion of trains and art in nine- teenth-century France takes place in a satire by Etienne Baudry illustrated by Gustave Courbet and called Le Camp des bourgeois (1868). In a chapter entitled "Le Destinee de Tart" a group of fictitious characters discusses the problem of the placement of works of art in a modern, urban world. Their major contention is that the bourgeoisie cares little for its aesthetic property and that modern, urban man has less and less time to go to museums (an observation that has turned out not to be true!). The solution to this apparent conundrum is proposed by Courbet himself: to place works of art in train stations, which will become not only "temples of progress," but also "temples of art."-' He recommends filling the huge, empty walls of waiting rooms with paintings that will instruct or educate the mass audience which comes there rather than to museums. For Baudry, the train had so utterly altered the mod- ern world that it was necessary for artists to reconsider the relationship between their works and the new public defined by mass transit. If Baudry wrote about the train station as the new temple of art, other writers were obsessed with the effect of rail travel upon the human body and 46 A DAY IN THE COUNTRY IMPRESSIONS [' compression:: DC VOYAGE. Fig. 8. Honore Daumier (French, 1808-1879), Impressions and Compressions of Travel ("Ah, misericordia, we are all lost!" "Eh! It's simply the train starting up again... as soon as the machine goes forward, the passengers go back ward... everyone knows that!..."). Litho- graph from The Railroads, 1853, pi. 9 (first state). Armand Hammer Foundation. Photo: Armand Hammer Foundation. its senses. While the volume of written evidence about the effect of speed on man is vast, two recent books, Marc Baroli's Le Train dans la litterature franqaise (1969) and Wolfgang Schivelbusch's Railway Journey (1979), treat the subject admirably. It was clear to early railway passengers that the phys- ical conditions of the railroad car as well as the speed and linearity of railway travel affected one's perception of the countryside and one's state of mind. The Goncourt brothers wrote in a fascinating manner of the vision of a rail passenger as a series of sensations/images/impressions perceived in rapid succession by an individual viewer who was forced into a continuum of time and space by the train itself.^- Speed, it was thought, changed one's relation- ship to place and to the landscape as a world of substance through which one could move and which one could touch (fig. 8). There are countless passages in contemporary travel guides that develop in specific contexts this idea of the dislocation of time in space pro- duced by railway travel. Louis Barron, who traveled in the He de France in the 1880s and published his book Les Environs de Paris in 1886, made frequent mention of the contrast between one's perception of a place from a moving train and that obtained from a stationary or pedestrian viewpoint. As he crossed the Oise River on a train heading for Pissarro's town of Pontoise, for example, he made that contrast explicit: "One perceives a rapid and striking vision of a gothic, indeed almost oriental, city, and that image evaporates as the train stops at the totally modern edge of a small provincial town. What a strange contrast!"'^ The train's rapid motion allowed Barron to create in his imagination an image, which, while derived from the facts of the landscape, was not true to it. As is clear from this particular description, the town of Pontoise seen from the train was considerably more interesting than the town seen from within. Claretie, in his book Voyage d'un Parisien (1865), wrote of the rela- THE IMPRESSIONIST LANDSCAPE AND THE IMAGE OF FRANCE 47 tionship between the way in which a landscape was perceived from the train and the way in which a landscape painter treated nature. Let us not disparage the straight line; it has its own particular charm. The country- side when perceived from the track of a train looks like it would if painted by an artist who proceeds, as did the great masters, to let us see only the large masses. Don't ask him for details, but for the whole ensemble in which there is life.^"' The countryside seen from the window of a train, for Claretie and many other writers, was an artistic countryside, then, lacking the stray details that would distract from what he called the "ensemble" of a landscape. His read- ers, simply by taking a train outside Paris, could "see" like artists. The fact that texts of this type were so common in this period must not be forgotten in a consideration of French landscape pamting. Artists also rode the trains in and out of Paris, as we have seen, and it is highly unlikely that they were unaware of the many allusions to train travel and painting made in the popular literature. To say that this material influenced them is perhaps too strong. It is correct, however, to point out the affinities between the view of the countryside reported by train travelers and the paintings by their contemporaries, the Impressionists. The landscapes painted by these artists in which trains puff away in the distance must have had two possible meanings to contemporary train riders. First, the train acted as an emblem of, or symbol for, the modern world of tourism. Second, the viewer was re- minded of the conditions of perception that occurred while riding a train. This last point is important because it raises the issue of the train as a symbol of progress, modernity, and change. Zola, in his novel La Bete humaine (1890), made the train itself (the "human beast") the "hero" of his novel. Zola's human characters fed, fixed, and ran the beast, giving their lives over to its rhythms, its moods, its demands. The Impressionists, particularly Monet, were clearly susceptible to the train's iconological power. Indeed, the latter's paintings of the 1870s, culminating in the great series of paintings of 1877-78 representing the interior of the first Gate Saint-Lazare (nos. 30- 32), served as a major source for Zola's later prose (see below, III/3— 4). It is interesting and not irrelevant to point out that the great anarchist- philosopher Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, in his posthumously published book Dn Principe de I'art et de sa destination sociale (1865), realized that machines themselves must enter the realm of art and suggested that motors be represented as perfectly and completely as possible. He called for a proper representation of the railroad train with the following words: In the locomotive, the motor is contained in the apparatus that puts it into motion; it is that condition which gives to the machine its formidable appearance and makes it truly representative of all machines. It is itself in every sense: its gigantic proportions, its roaring and its effect of panting, the smells of its furnace, its speed.... '^ Although many photographers and illustrators worked to record the train as the symbol of the two conditions of life thought essential to modernity' — speed and change — few important painters except Monet accepted such a challenge (see below, 111/3-4). The words "speed" and "change" occur over and over again in French writing, both popular and self-consciously literary, of the nineteenth century. Attitudes toward these seemingly inevitable conditions of modern life were predictably varied. The very frequency of their use together with the fact that many writers worried about the velocity of change indicates that concern 48 A DAY IN THE COLINTRY over modernity and its ramifications was almost universal. Whether one embraced it, as did Monet and Zola, or looked at it vt'ith jaundiced eyes, as did Pissarro and Flaubert, the modern, urban world, the world of progress, seemed to be moving forward at a rapid and uncontrollable rate. The Impres- sionists painted many aspects of that world, surely knowing, as literate, if not highly educated. Frenchmen, that they lived on the cusp of time. Their paint- ings indicate to us that they kept one foot on each side of what seemed then to be the moment of transition between history and contemporaneity, between a world whose patterns were clearly defined and one through which one moved by instinct, unsure of the future. If their paintings project a certain air of complacency, almost an inevitability, this quality was achieved with dif- ficulty, indeed was wrung from a landscape in transition. In fact, when Impressionist pictures are considered in the context of their time, the concep- tual or philosophical confusion of nineteenth-century Frenchmen seems per- haps to be the clearest signal to us from a landscape in transition that was really not so different from our own. — R. B. Notes 1. Castagnary, 1869, pp. 3-4. I.Snyder, 1964, p. 9. 3. See Castagnary, 1869. 4. Lecarpentier, 1817, p. 25. 5. Bloch, 1971, p. 15. 6. Bioch, 1912-13, p. 325. 7. Snyder, 1964, pp. 9-116. 8. See Gellner, 1983. 9. K. Varnedoe, work in progress. 10. Zeldin, 1977, pp. 3-85. ll.Ibid., pp. 3-21. 12. See Gravier, 1942. 13. V. Scully, work in progress. 14. See A. Joanne, 1859. 15. Kohn, 1975, pp. 46-75. 16. Bretteli, 1977, pp. 28-38. 17. See Worcester Art Museum and The American Federation of Arts, 1982. 18. About, 1864, p. 155. 19. See particularly her introduction to Franqois le cbanipi (1846). 20. Zeldin, 1973, p. 91. 21.Faucher, 1962, p. 181. 22. Thomson, 1891, p. 29. 23. Pissarro, 1950, p. 500. 24. See Worcester Art Museum and The American Federation of Arts, 1982. 25. Bretteli and Lloyd, 1980, pp. 33-36. 26. See Bart, 1956; Poinet, 1916. 27. Guide de voyageur..., c. 1865, p. 1. 28. Michel, 1876, p. 15. 29. See Daly, 1864-72. 30. Giffard, 1887, p. 314. 31.Baudry, 1868, p. 289. 32. See Baroli, 1969. 33. Barron, 1886, p. 565. 34. Claretie, 1865, p. 316. 35. See Proudhon, 1865. THE IMPRESSIONIST LANDSCAPE AND THE IMAGE OF FRANCE 49 ^!-i 1 ii^ H^ r'^Em mt^ ■^iSrn^ '^^ '^^^^-:';-«}^'- %^. \ ■ *'l ; i 4*, ^ "H -91.. '\' The French Landscape Sensibihty IN THE OPENING DECADES of the nineteenth century, landscape painting underwent a long, difficult, and bloodless revolution. This process even- tually led to the development of Impressionism, which, as we have seen, actually had roots deep within the tradition of French landscape painting (see above, II). In 1800 and 1818, respectively, the painter Valenciennes and his student Jean-Baptiste Deperthes had written valuable theoretical and practical treatises on landscape in an attempt to raise this genre from its then rather lowly position within the artistic hierarchy of acceptable subject mat- ter. This was not too difficult, in fact, since other types of pictures — specifi- cally, history paintings — had become arcane and difficult to decipher. As a result, well before the Impressionists began to paint, landscape, because of its relative ease of comprehension as well as its scale and attractiveness, had become a desirable commodity. The theoretical interest in it, combined with a demand on the part of a new and ever-increasing audience for art, provided the necessary basis for its popularity. By the mid-1 830s, landscape so dominated other painting genres that the influential periodical U Artiste could proclaim with confidence that "landscape is truly the painting genre of our time."^ By the '50s, landscape painting had become the second-most-purchased type of art acquired by the State. In his review of the Salon of 1857 Castagnary cited the decline of his- tory painting in favor of landscape with some pleasure, for he felt, along with many others, that it was the most important subject of art.- It is clear from the number of landscapes produced, exhibited, and sold that Castagnary had his finger on the pulse of his time. Although the Ecole des Beaux-Arts contin- ued its vain attempt to resuscitate the failing body of history painting, by the 1870s the Barbizon painters had been so successful that the fledgling artists who later were to become the Impressionists could look to them to inspire hope for similar pecuniary results (see below, IV). 53 Fig. 9. Nicolas-Antoine Taunay (French, 1755-1830), Landscape with an Aqueduct, 1810. Oil on canvas. 45.7 x 53.3 cm. Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Photo: LACMA. As early as the seventeenth century, French theorists and critics had divided landscape into two sub-categories. The more acceptable to the Academie des Beaux-Arts and to wealthy patrons of this period was the "he- roic" landscape, which depicted a specific event and thus demonstrated the erudition of the artist as well as (and perhaps more importantly) that of the buyer The other category, which had a considerably longer and stronger life span, was the "rural" landscape, which merely illustrated a scene discovered by the artist in nature, and which was intended in turn to stimulate an emo- tional response similar to his on the part of the viewer In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries the heroic or historical landscape in the grand manner as conceived by Claude and Gaspard Dughet was raised to a position of preeminence. This does not mean, of course, that other types of landscape were not pursued. In fact, by 1850 the rural type had come to dominate the field. The subject of a landscape, then, was of the utmost importance. It affected the place of an artist's work in the Academic hierarchy and deter- mined the final appearance of a painting. According to Roger de Piles' Course de peinture par principes (1708), a forerunner of Valenciennes' and Deperthes' texts, the two different strains of landscape required by their na- tures different qualities of finish. The heroic, being the more important, had to be worked up to a high degree of completion, resulting in an extremely polished, smooth surface (fig. 9). The rural landscape, being of lesser impor- tance, did not require this level of finish, but could maintain instead a sketchier, more lively appearance, rather like that of a preparatory modele, or sketch. It was this lack of finish in rural landscapes as well as the conception behind them that proved attractive to later generations of painters and theo- rists. Interestingly enough, it was the rough surface of Impressionist paintings that most provoked the ire of contemporary critics, however (see below, IV). Valenciennes' 1800 text, entitled Elements de perspective pratique, os- 54 A DAY IN THE COUNTRY Fig. 10. J.-B.-C. Corot (French, 1796-1875), Seine and Old Bridge at Limay, c. 1870. Oil on canvas. 40.7 .x 66 cm. Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Photo: LACMA. sified this bifurcated response to landscape and was adopted instantly as a handbook for landscape painters throughout the nineteenth century. In fact, even Pissarro recommended the book to his son as a guide to the fundamen- tals of painting. Although this may not have been the only inspiration for French artists' choice of sites to paint, it is nonetheless significant that it was Valenciennes who suggested that they search river banks, in France instead of in Italy (he mentions the Seine and Oise by name), as well as the forest of Fontainebleau, for new motifs to inspire different visual effects. In such locales, he said, the artist could capture his own emotional response to virgin landscape in sketches made en plein air, out-of-doors at the site. It was under- stood, of course, that such sketches were to be thought of only as studies for use later in working up larger paintings, which were finished in the studio. Deperthes, Valenciennes' student, reiterated these ideas in his 1818 book, Theorie du paysage. In the end, it was Deperthes, along with Marcel Guerin; Antoine- Chrysostome Quatremere de Quincy, Secretaire perpetuel de I'academie; Comte de Vaublanc, Ministre de I'interieure et de la decentralisation; and others who were influential in having the Academie institute a Prix de Rome for landscape painting in 1817. Although it was awarded only every four years and was granted exclusively in the category of heroic or historical land- scape, those whose concern had been the elevation of the lowly genre of land- scape painting felt that they had succeeded, and in no small measure. The very first Prix de Rome in this category was awarded to Achille-Etna Michallon for his 1817 Detnocritus and the Abderitans (Ecole des Beaux- Arts, Paris), whose title places it squarely in the category of heroic landscape. The Academie, no doubt, felt secure that this new prize assured a continuity with the moral-minded subjects of the other awards. This concern becomes more comprehensible when one sees it in the context of the contemporary historical situation. The Salon of 1817 was the first to follow the restoration THE FRENCH LANDSCAPE SENSIBILITY 55 Map 3. Melun and the Forest of Fontainebleau. of the Bourbons under Louis XVIII. More than anything else there was a conscious attempt on the part of the newly reinstalled monarchy to weave back together the great traditions of French history and art, which had been rent apart since the Revolution. Ignoring the sociological as well as the artis- tic changes which had occurred in the 28 years since 1789, the official artistic community sought to encourage the earlier tradition of historical landscape. Deperthes' belief that landscape, and most particularly rural land- scape, would attract those who were uneducated, who responded emotion- ally and not intellectually, may have made the political and artistic arbiters of the Second Empire apprehensive. In 1863 Comte de Nieuwerkerke, Superi- eure des beaux-arts under Napoleon III, fearing the growing interest in this most democratic of genres, abruptly eliminated the Prix de Rome for land- scape painting and proceeded to reform the entire structure of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts as well as Salon procedures. This same year saw the Salon des Refuses, the beginning of the end of the artistic hierarchy as it had been known. The growing interest in landscape painting could not be halted, how- ever. Indeed, in 1869, the Academic began to grant, albeit privately, a new prize in this genre. Every two years the Prix Troyon (contributed by the mother of the great animal-painter Constant Troyon) was to be awarded to a worthy artist. Now, however, there were no iconographical stipulations — neither a theme nor figural staffage of any kind was required. Pure landscape, already a success with both patrons and artists, was finally given official sanction. By 1868 Zola, in a review of the Salon of that year, could pro- nounce definitively that "classical landscape [was] dead, murdered by life and truth."' During the nineteenth century, as has been mentioned, a great many French artists took to the out-of-doors. They chose to render unidealized views of what lay before them, in the hope of capturing, in a casual way, the genius of a specific place. In this sense they opposed themselves to the formal- ity of their more traditionally inclined predecessors. No longer concerned with depicting scenes which took place in ancient Greece and Rome, they chose specific places in France as their sites (fig. 10). This nationalistic interest in specific locales was developed initially by Millet, Theodore Rousseau, Corot, Daubigny, Courbet, and others. But, al- though these painters tramped the uncultivated woods to the southeast of Paris (map 3) and the rough rocks of the English Channel (map 4), they were urban men, seeking what they believed the cities could no longer offer. They were men who found themselves in an increasingly mechanized world — art- ists who grew up and lived in a period when industrialization was making its greatest advances. In effect, their retreat from the urban centers, especially Paris, to a world uncontaminated by suburbanization, railroads, and the gen- eral development of industry was in every sense an escape to what they be- lieved to be a better world (see above, II). In the end, then, just as with history painting's artificially composed, self-contained, and intellectually self-refer- ential views of the Roman Campagna peopled by mythological or historical figures, French landscape painting at mid-century also sought to represent a golden age on canvas, but one of the relatively recent national past (fig. 11). As plein-air painters, the Impressionists were most like Corot and Daubigny in the way they sought to depict the landscape they discovered having stepped off a train, coach, or boat. The conciliatory nature of Corot's 56 A DAY IN THE COUNTRY Map 4. Paris and Environs. and Daubigny's paintings — unlike the more confrontative modes ot Courbet and Millet — proved attractive to the Impressionists of the 1860s and '70s. Although the sense of preoccupation with the landscape was the legacy of the entire Barbizon group, in the areas of composition and overall mood only the complacent appearance and desultory atmosphere of certain paintings by that school were acceptable to, and adopted by, the new generation. On a technical level, however, Courbet's work was also of interest; his technique of thick impasto applied with a palette knife also influenced Monet, Pissarro, Cezanne, and — in a more limited way — Sisley and Renoir, most of whom Courbet met in person in the 1860s. Corot and Daubigny contributed in other than philosophical ways to the artistic formulation of early Impressionism. Corot's early attempts to resuscitate the classical compositions of Dughet and Claude, though trans- formed by him by the 1850s into a peculiarly personal idiom, were admired by the Impressionist painters. Daubigny sought to aid them through his per- sonal connections with the artistic establishment. In addition, the freedom with which his own later works were executed reveals a painter of an older generation in sympathy with younger artists. Overlaid onto the Barbizon artists' rigid compositions, interest in di- rectly observed nature, and heavy use of impasto and palette knife were the recent researches of Jongkind and Eugene Boudin into an even more pro- found pictorial literalism. Combining these elements with an intensified pal- ette of pure color, the Impressionists consciously prepared the way for some- thing totally new. However, the melancholy which pervades their early pictures betrays a tinge of emotionalism which they seemed able to eradicate only gradually. Their interest was in reducing the subjective interpolation of THE FRENCH LANDSCAPE SENSIBILITY S7 Fig. 11. Corot, Forest at Fontainebleau, 1847. Oil on canvas. 90.5 x 129.5 cm. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Photo: Museum of Fine Arts. the moods of man onto his surroundings, in eliminating the reflection of human feelings m nature seen, for example, in works by the Barbizon painter Diaz (fig. 12). They took the Barbizon landscape, then, and cleared it of its more overtly Romantic associations, of its subjective morality. They brought to it a degree of objectivity that had existed before only in sketches painted directly from nature. These are the most significant differences between the Impressionist landscape and its predecessors. The art of the Barbizon painters had sought to rally aesthetic forces to protest the disappearance of untouched nature and the decline of the "noble peasant" as a result of the industrialization and urbanization of France. The Impressionists, on the other hand, as we have seen (see above, II), found only beauty and wonder in those aspects of modernization that were totally alter- ing urban and rural life. The Impressionists accepted with equanimity man and his physical effect on the landscape. For example, although one of Monet's first paintings. Landscape ivith Factories (1858-61; Private Collec- tion, Paris) is a small depiction of a factory, just a few years later he was painting the Saint-Simeon farm near Honfleur (a favorite site in Normandy of the Barbizon painters) with the same degree of interest and a similar degree of detachment (nos. 4-6). Because man and his works were thought of as an integral part of nature, they were considered equally worthy of depiction. Monet's work at Honfleur serves to remind us that, in spite of the considerable philosophical differences between them and the Barbizon art- ists, the Impressionists' early sites were the very same ones which the Bar- bizon painters had begun to frequent in the 1840s and '50s. Tourists and Parisian weekenders had discovered them as well (see above, II). By the time Monet (fig. 13), Frederic Bazille, Sisley, and Renoir had followed Courbet, Daubigny, and Jongkind to the Normandy coast, Sainte-Adresse, Le Havre, Trouville, and Etretat had been so developed for tourism that the press could poke fun at their current state. Henry James, as Parisian correspondent to the 58 A DAY IN THE COUNTRY Fig. 12. Narcisse Virgile Diaz de la Pena (French, 1807-1876), Landscape, c. 1850. Oil on canvas. 31.7 x 41.9 cm. Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Photo: LACMA. New York Tribune, wrote on August 26, 1876, of the crowded beaches on the coast of Normandy: "From Trouville to Boulogne is a chain of what the French call bathing stations, each with its particular claim to patron- age....each weans you from the corruptions of civiHzation, but. ..lets you down gently upon the bosom of nature.'"* In this description of Etretat, James hit on the very reasons for the continuous middle-class flight from the city. Urban dwellers also sought the virgin forest of Fontainebleau and the small towns of Barbizon, Marlotte, and Chailly-en-Biere that edged its bor- ders. Although artists had come to the forest as a refuge from city life early in the century, by the 1860s it had become a seasonal retreat for all. Hotels and inns existed in every hamlet to absorb the myriad urban visitors. So common, in fact, had the escape to Fontainebleau become that, hke the beaches, it could be mentioned in print as an instandy recognizable tourist refuge. The tourist in Fontainebleau became a common topos in contemporary literature. Flaubert's L'Education sentimental has its hero, Frederic Moreau, take the demimondaine Rosanette to Chailly-en-Biere and Marlotte, with guidebooks in hand, to check off the trees and views described. In fact, the two tourists even espy a painter in a blue smock beneath a tree, presumably capturing his motif on canvas. While the earlier generation of landscape artists had come to Nor- mandy and Fontainebleau to depict the French landscape for the first time, in isolation, and as an escape from the city, the Impressionists came not to dis- cover the new, but to record the known; not alone, but as part of a crowd. While it is true that in the 1870s and even in the '80s they sought to render specific places under specific conditions, by 1892 — in the words of the critic Georges Lecomte — they had begun gradually to "[withdraw] themselves from reality and [make] compositions far from nature, in order to realize a total harmony."' This is not so very far from Castagnary's 1863 definition of naturalism, which embraced a group of artists who had turned almost exclu- THE FRENCH LANDSCAPE SENSIBILITY S9 Fig. 13. Monet, View of the Coast at Le Havre, 1864. Oil on canvas. 40 x 66.5 cm. The Minneapolis Institute of Arts. Photo: The Minneapolis Institute of Arts. -yv^^:^*:^^. sively to painting landscapes that dealt in no way with the social, psychologi- cal, or political problems of the day. "^ The Impressionists had absolved them- selves of the responsibility to illustrate or to use representational color laid over a perspectival foundation of whatever sort (see below, III/8). The elimination of the historical, the anecdotal, and the sentimental from Impressionist pictures of the 1870s and '80s does not mean that these artists were iconographically indifferent, however. Just as with the lack of finish, it was the effrontery to established expectations about a given genre that caused critics to be outraged and the public to be scandalized over the exhibition of their paintings (see below, IV). The Impressionists' lack of con- cern for the highly finished and varnished surfaces of Academic paintings, as well as their disregard for traditional subject matter, were viewed as an attack on the forms of art that the government — through the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and the Salon — condoned and, more importantly, supported. In its efforts to save traditional painting with identifiable subject matter and slick surfaces, which was created in amazing quantity (there may have been over 100,000 pictures produced during the second half of the nineteenth century), the State took a position of opposition to Impressionism, although, given the artists' fitful record of Salon acceptances, this opposition, while vocal, was not of a single mind. Even at the end of the century, there were those who still la- mented the popularity of the new landscape painting. Philippe de Chenne- vieres, Conservateur at the Musee de Luxembourg from 1863 to 1873, lived in anticipation of the passing of the plein-air school of Monet and the rest. The great landscape tradition of the past, he wrote in a letter to the landscape painter Charles-Frederic Henriet, eventually would be revived and France would see a return to expression, invention, and composition in art — charac- teristics which, he felt. Impressionism lacked.^ Plein-air painting as practiced 60 A DAY IN THE COUNTRY by Monet and the other Impressionists finally did succumb to the passage of time. But the new school of landscape painters looked back less to the past of Henriet and de Chennevieres than forward in the spirit of the avant-garde. — S. S. Notes 1. L'Artiste, 1836, p. 25. 2. Castagnary, 1892, vol. 1, pp. 2-48. 3. Zola, 1959, p. 133. 4. James, 1952, pp. 198,200. 5. Lecomte, 1892, p. 58. 6. Castagnary, 1892, vol. 1, pp. 105-106, 140. 7. Henriet, 1896, pp. xvii-xviii. THE FRENCH LANDSCAPE SENSIBILITY 61 1. Claude Monet Beach at Honfleur (Le Bord de la mer a Honfleur), 1864-66 In the summer of 1864 Monet and Bazille set off from Paris by steamboat down the Seine for Honfleur on the Nor- mandy coast where Monet's parents, residents of Le Havre, had a summer house at Sainte-Adresse (nos. 4—6). Soon after their arrival, Bazille wrote to his mother from the rooms they had rented in the center of Honfleur: It took us a whole day to get here because on the way we stopped in Rouen [to see the Cathedral and the Museum].. ..As soon as we got to Honfleur we looked around for landscape subjects. They were easy to find because this country is a paradise.' Beach at Honfleur was begun very late in the summer after Bazille had re- turned reluctantly to Paris to pursue his medical studies. Monet stayed on, con- tinuing to meet and work with Boudin and Jongkmd. This painting of the Cote de Grace with its distant view of the Hos- pice lighthouse and the hospital of Honfleur may actually have been painted with Jongkind in attendance — a view of this same site can be seen in two watercolors by him, one of which is dated September 6, 1864 (Mr. and Mrs. James S. Deeley, New York, and Private Collection). Of all Monet's paintings of the harbor, jetty, and town of Honfleur executed during this period, however, Beach at Honfleur is the only depiction of this particular view. More than 20 years later, Seurat chose the same site for a landscape (Alfred Beattv Collection, Dublin). It is probable that Monet began his painting from nature, but there is no doubt that it was worked up later in the studio. The carefully applied, short, loaded strokes of paint that so success- fully capture the flickering coastal light and enliven the entire surface of the can- vas make it clear that the picture was completed in a comfortable environ- ment. In fact, in Bazille's painting (Pri- vate Collection, France) of the studio he shared with Monet until January 1866 at 6, rue de Furstenburg in Paris, Monet's Beach at Honfleur may be the picture shown in the center of a wall of figure studies and landscapes; however, the cloud formations, six silhouetted sail- boats, and single figure (presumably a fisherman in a blue smock or blouse de travail, a kind of uniform adopted by workmen at this time) of Monet's fin- ished canvas are absent. This suggests that Monet may have brought Beach at Honfleur to completion some two years after he had commenced it.- NOTES 1. The Art Institute of Chicago, 1978, p. 166. 2. Although D. Wildenstein (no. 41) accepts un- equivocably that Monet's painting is depicted here, one cannot rule out the possibiht)' that the work may have been by Bazille himself. That x\\o artists could choose to depict the same motif from the same point of view is shown over and over again in paintings by the Impressionists. This would not, however, nullif)' the argument presented here that Monet's painting was com- pleted later in the studio and not en plein air. 2—3. Edouard Manet Departure from Boulogne Harbor (Sortie du port de Boulogne), 1864-65 Moonlight over Boulogne Harbor (Clair de lune sur le port de Boulogne), 1869 Boulogne on the north coast of France proved to be attractive to Manet as well as other Parisian tourists. His arrival there sometime during the summer of 1864 gave him the chance to experiment within the tradition of marine painting. Of all the pictures of this type that he completed. Departure from Boulogne Harbor seems the least dependent on reality. Although one could cite the strong influence of Japanese prints evi- dent in the picture's high horizon line and flat, smooth application of paint, a comparison of this painting with Manet's other marine subjects almost leads one to believe that the painting is either a sketch or simply a canvas record- ing his experiences away from the actual- ity of the site. Departure from Boulogne Harbor may have been the painting ex- hibited at the 1865 Salon (as no. 8) or in 1867 (as no. 40, Vue de mer, temps calme). Its total abstraction provides lit- tle visual evidence of Manet's trip to Boulogne, however. As with The Battle of the Kearsage and the Alabama (Phila- delphia Museum of Art), which was ex- hibited at the dealer Cadart's shop in Paris in July 1864, it is unclear whether Manet painted Departure from Bou- logne Harbor from life. 62 A DAI' IN THE COLINTRY No. 1. Claude Monet Beach AT HoNFLEUR, 1864-66 THE FRENCH LANDSCAPE SENSIBILITY 63 No. 2. Edouard Manet Departurje from Boulogne Harbor, 1864-65 64 A DAY IN THE COUNTRY No. 3. Edouard Manet Moonlight over Boulogne Harbor, 1869 THE FRENCH LANDSCAPE SENSIBILITY 65 The painting's horizontality is em- phasized by the relatively unmodulated blue-green of the calm sea, which oc- cupies three-quarters of the picture sur- face. The black boats with their cor- responding black sails add an ominous note to the seemingly straightforward scene. Through these various sailboats, a strange, apparently ironclad vessel powered by steam chugs diagonally up across the painting's surface, leaving a whitish-green wake which creates the only sense of movement into depth on the canvas. This picture carries the art- ist's disregard for traditional perspective to extremes; the painting is, in fact, with- out time or place. A more realistic picture, albeit a portentious and mysterious one, is Moonlight over Boulogne Harbor of 1869. Manet had returned to the coast in this year, staying for two to three months at the Hotel Folkstone near the quay. From his window on the second floor of the hotel he recorded the day's activities; his subjects ranged from the Departure of the Folkstone Boat (Philadelphia Museum of Art) to this depiction of the local fishmongers whose white bonnets are illuminated by the moonlight as they prepare the night's catch for the morning market. The black shapes of the dock workers and fishermen are silhouetted, like the masts of the ships, against the brightly lit horizon. Although Manet was certainly inspired by the events seen out of his window, this scene was most certainly observed through a "filter": his experience of seventeenth-century Dutch paintings such as the fantastic nocturnal scenes of Aert van der Neer, a picture by whom Manet himself once owned. 4. Frederic Bazille Beach at Sainte-Adresse (La Plage a Sainte-Adresse), 1865 5-6. Claude Monet Terrace at Sainte-Adresse (Terrasse a Sainte-Adresse), 1867 The Beach at Sainte-Adresse (La Plage de Sainte-Adresse), 1867 Bazille and Monet came to Honfleur not only because of Monet's filial devotion, but because the great Barbizon painters had come to work at this very place: the Saint-Simeon farm outside Honfleur and its surro.unding woods, coasts, and towns. Bazille's Beach at Sainte-Adresse was based heavily on Monet's painting of the same site (1864; The Minneapolis Institute of Arts) and was conceived, along with a landscape of Saint-Sauveur (Bazille's father's farm near Mont- pellier), as overdoor panels in response to a commission from the artist's uncle, M. Pomie-Layrargues, for his house in Montpellier. To render his view of Le Havre, the next town along the coast south of Sainte-Adresse, Bazille simply enlarged Monet's painting at the right and reduced its highly reflective light to a rather more sober one created by a lowering sun; the sense of scale which Monet found so difficult to capture is here brought into harmony. However, unlike Monet, Bazille did not paint sur le fnotif, that is, at the site; his painting was based on Monet's smaller picture and undoubtedly was executed in the studio. In fact, on the left over the stove niche in Bazille's painting of that studio can be seen a landscape painting by himself which may have been placed there to inspire him in creating these room decorations. Monet returned in the summer of 1867 to Sainte-Adresse — the vacation haven of the bourgeoisie of Le Havre and of tourists from Paris — to visit his family and to paint. Terrace at Sainte-Adresse depicts members of his family seated on the terrace above the English Channel. Monet's father is shown seated wearing a white straw hat and looking toward the sailboats and Le Havre two kilome- ters away. The horizon line is populated by all manner of seagoing craft: small boats with sails furled are seen close to the harbor and town, boats with full sails trimmed can be seen further away, and steamships and large rigged ships pass the Cap de la Heve on their way into the Channel. Seen in the lowering sun of a late summer day are the kinds of subjects Monet preferred to depict — the sea, the middle class at leisure (Sainte-Adresse had been "created" by tourism), and cul- tivated gardens (see below, III/6 and 8). As critic and collector Theodore Duret pointed out in 1878, in Monet's pictures "you won't find any cattle or sheep. ..still less any peasants. The Artist feels drawn toward embellished nature...."' That same summer Monet depicted the beach at Sainte-Adresse just south of this terrace. The same three-sailed boat seen above the parasol held by Monet's distant cousin, Jeanne-Marguerite Lecadre, in his painting of the terrace has here come closer into Sainte-Adresse. Other pleasure boats with and without sails are shown both moored and in use. Monet has contrasted a group of local fishermen with a man and young girl seated at the water's edge and dressed in bourgeois fashions; undoubtedly they are tourists. The man watches some of the distant boats through a spyglass. Ho- tels can be seen at the left on the edge of the high ground before it slopes to the beach. No site, no activity was too mun- dane for Monet to set down on canvas during these visits to his family during the summer months between 1864 and 1867. Note l.Nochlin, 1966, p. 30. 7—8. Frederic Bazille Landscape at Chailly (Paysage a Chailly), 1865 The Forest of Fontainebleau (Foret DE Fontainebleau), 1865 Bazille and Monet, while students (with Sisley and Renoir) in Charles Gleyre's Paris studio, spent the Easter holiday of 1863 in the forest of Fontainebleau in order to paint from nature. Exactly two years later, Monet returned to Chailly- en-Biere, one of the more important towns situated just at the edge of the for- est, southeast of Paris, a few kilometers from the smaller town of Barbizon. Sisley and Renoir were also in the vi- cinity, staying in Marlotte. Monet wrote to Bazille in Paris to join him. Bazille took the 59-kilometer train journey from the Gare de Lyon and joined Monet at the Hotel du Lion d'Or near Melun sometime at the very beginning of the summer. In the surrounding forest they painted in the open air. In fact, for Bazille it was the last time he would paint at Fontainebleau; his only plein-air paint- ings done after this were executed in the south of France, near his family's Montpellier estate (no. 79). 66 A DAY IN THE COUNTRY No. 4. Frederic Bazille Beach AT SArNT*ADRESSE, 1865 THE FRENCH LANDSCAPE SENSIBILITY 67 No. 5. Claude Monet Terr,^ce at Saintt-Adresse, 1867 68 A DAY IN THE COUNTRY '.{Mirf t-noriir^'^ ' No. 6. Claude Monet The Buch at Sainte-Adresse, 1867 THE FRENCH LANDSCAPE SENSIBILITY 69 Chailly-en-Biere and Barbizon are less than two kilometers apart on the western edge of the forest. Rousseau painted there in the late 1830s and by mid-century Charles Jacques and Millet had actually moved to the latter hamlet. Even today there are no railway lines to either town although they are both on an important post road from Paris. A visitor traveling by train to either place from the Gare de Lyon would disembark at Melun (45 kilometers from Paris) or Bois-le-Roi (51 kilometers from the city). In the immediate vicinity of both towns are two of the most popular of the sites so often recorded by landscape artists: the stand of oaks at Bas-Breau (with its famous Bodmer Oak) and the Gorges d'Apre- mont. Bazille and Monet knew these sites intimately, having seen them in paintings and having had with them their guidebooks by Claude-Frangois Denecourt and Joanne (see above, II), which provided (in handy octavo vol- umes) a point-by-point tour of the forest, with important landscape features indi- cated by blue and red markers. With these guides, and in the company of the various artists whom the two young men came to know there, Monet and Bazille saw and painted some of the major sites of the forest in the summer of 1865. Landscape at Chailly and The For- est of Fontainebleau, then, represent Bazille's last artistic attempts to record the landscape of the He de France. And, as in his previous efforts, his debts to the great masters of the Barbizon landscape are evident. At this time Monet was working on studies for his large Lun- cheon on the Grass (Destroyed), with Bazille posing for several of the figures; the painting itself was completed in their Paris studio in 1866. Bazille's own con- cern was more with landscapes like those illustrated here as well as with a painting of Monet recuperating from an accident (Musee d'Orsay, Galerie du Jeu de Paume, Paris). It must have been particu- larly exciting for the artists to have Courbet come to watch them work as well as introduce them to Corot. These two landscapes by Bazille rely less on the works of his acknowledged masters in the genre than on his own ability to capture the summer light as it played across the foliage and rocks of the forest. In fact, Landscape at Chailly has the appearance of having been begun and completed totally sur le motif. It has all the informality and brilliance of a Co- rot sketch of 40 years earlier and reveals an artist of great confidence and ability, capable of carrying off a similar under- taking on a larger scale. The painting possesses the vibrant luminosity for which Monet had begun to strive the previous year at Honfleur. The Forest of Fontainebleau, on the other hand, reveals a constant awareness of a great Barbizon landscape formula which Bazille emulated. His palette here is dark, and the quality of flickering light is less insistent and certainly less dependent on reality than in Landscape at Chailly. Bazille's reliance on the work of Corot and Diaz is evident in The Forest of Fon- tainebleau. The two paintings together reveal an artist at a crucial moment, as he moves away with assurance in new, and as yet unexplored, directions from a dependence on his artistic ancestors. 9. Camille Pissarro The Banks of the Marne in Winter (BORDS DE LA MaRNE EN HIVEr), 1866 Critics of the Salon of 1866, in which this early river scene was shown, were struck, as we are today, by the mundane quality of the scene Pissarro had chosen to depict. The simple field, long road, and barren farm near his home in La Varenne-Saint-Hilaire on the Marne River (across from Chennevieres-sur- Marne) just southeast of Paris struck a particular aesthetic chord and prompted some favorable comment in the contem- porary press. Although the painting may have been finished in the Paris studio to which the artist had had access since 1864, by January 1866 Pissarro had moved with his family to La Roche- Guyon on the Seine just north of Paris, on the way to Rouen. In spite of the fact that the 1866 Salon was the first in which Pissarro did not state his association with his teacher Corot and the Barbizon school, the painting obstinately betrays a debt to the latter. Corot's earlier dark palette as well as his extraordinary ability to create a palpable yet inexorable framework for his landscapes are evident here. Al- though one can still feel a tension between the Barbizon painters' concern for the conveying of a particular mood (here quite naturally heightened by the season depicted), and Pissarro's belief (echoed by his Impressionist colleagues) in a totally natural and objective point of view, the balance is clearly tipping here in favor of the latter aesthetic. The paint- ing's power comes from Pissarro's on- going experience of the work of Courbet. But while the facture reveals the former's awareness of the latter's use of the pal- ette knife, it was combined here with the medium-reduced pigments of Daubigny in an attempt to achieve a flatness of stroke and effect combined with a sense of pure, but dull, color. To point out Pissarro's heritage, however, in no way mitigates his great originality even at this stage of his career. 10. Alfred Sisley Avenue of Chestnut Trees at La Celle-Saint-Cloud (Allee de chataicniers pres de la Celle-Saint-Cloud), 1867 Sisley worked in his studio in Paris until 1870. The subjects of his paintings dur- ing this period show that he traveled and worked in and around the capital and the areas near the towns of Barbizon and Fontainebleau. His Avenue of Chestnut Trees at La Celle-Saint-Cloud was shown in the Salon of 1868. It was painted at La Celle-Saint-Cloud, six- and-a-half kilometers from Saint-Cloud to the west of Paris in the township of Marly-le-Roi. Situated between Bougival and Vaucresson on the Paris — Saint- Germain-en-Laye railroad line, the Allee de Chataigniers was considered the most interesting of the three woods which sur- rounded the tiny town of La Celle with its population of 560. When Sisley vis- ited the area to paint in 1866-67, the Allee was owned by Napoleon III (per- haps one of the reasons why Sisley was able to show his picture at the Salon in 1868). By the early nineteenth century Saint-Cloud had become a very popular Parisian holiday refuge, easily accessible by train and steamboat. Paul Huet, one 70 A DAY IN THE COUNTRY No. 7. Frederic Bazille Landscape at Chailly. 1865 THE FRENCH LANDSCAPE SENSIBILITY 71 K - . - V - %, ': ^ , ^ ^ "'■<«=r-/^ , -^>"" .S'-^^^f. No. 8. Frederic Bazille The Forest of Fontainebleau, 1865 72 A DAY IN THE COUNTRY No. 9. Camille Pissarro The Banks of the Marne in WrNTER, 1866 (detail on p. 52) THE FRENCH LANDSCAPE SENSIBILITY 73 of the important artists associated with Barbizon, recalled that Saint-Cloud was "that enchanting place one talks about when in Italy."' The April 18, 1874, issue of La Vie Farisienne encouraged readers who liked long, beautiful walks in the country to visit the area as often as possi- ble. And, according to Augustus J. C. Hare's Days near Paris (1888), "true Parisians of the middle class have no greater pleasure than a day spent at Saint-Cloud."- This painting shows Sisley's reliance on Barbizon artists such as Rousseau, Courbet, Diaz, and Daubigny. It was Daubigny who advocated Sisley's being approved by the Salon jury. Twenty-eight years earlier Rousseau had submitted a painting entitled Avenue of Chestnut Trees (Musee du Louvre, Paris) to the Salon of 1839, and it had been rejected. Although Rousseau's painting depicts the Chateau de Souliers near Cerizay in Poitou and not Saint-Cloud, the concep- tion of the two pictures is close enough to suggest that Sisley knew Rousseau's picture. The enclosing forest of full- leafed trees depicted by the former pro- vides a brilliant pattern across the entire surface of his canvas. The deeply satu- rated colors on a dark ground reveal his dependence on Courbet's landscapes of the early to mid-1860s, such as his in- numerable depictions of the Puits Noir. So, too, does the deer crossing the road at the center right — a motif which some of Courbet's new patrons demanded be included before they would purchase his pictures, in order to provide a focus or sense of relative proportions. Corot's painting of the same period as the Sisley work. The Sevres Road (1864; The Baf- timore Museum of Art), depicts a contig- uous site and also may have been an inspiration. Sisley's work, however, is much more timid than Courbet's; the former's technique relies less on the latter's palette knife than on Corot's later, more personal, liquid application of pigment, which allowed for few hard edges: one object effortlessly blends into another. Sisley's treatment never approx- imated Corot's lyrical fantasies, how- ever; his work remains impersonal and firmly wedded to the reality of the place depicted. Notes l.Miquel, 1962, p. 34. 2. Hare, 1888, pp. 11-12. 11. Alfred Sisley Village Street of Marlotte (Rue du village a Marlotte), 1866 Although the training in landscape of Sisley, Monet, Bazille, and Renoir in Gleyre's Paris studio was limited and the studio closed down in March 1863 due to the master's ill health, the four men remained friends, traveling and painting together when they could find the time. In fact, in 1865 Renoir and Sisley went to Marlotte, a town of less than 100 peo- ple near Moret on the Loing River, just southeast of Fontainebleau, at the invita- tion of Renoir's friend Jules Le Coeur, who had a house there. Monet and Bazille went to Chailly-en-Biere at the very edge of the forest of Fontainebleau. The train from the Gare de Lyon would have taken under two-and-a-half hours to travel the sixty-five-kilometer dis- tance. Although there was no train to Marlotte, it was a short coach ride or walk from the Bois-le-Roi station to Chailly-en-Biere. Marlotte and Chailly were not so far apart that the four men did not occa- sionally see one another. For example, Renoir recorded their dining together at mere Anthony's inn in a large painting, At the Inn of Mother Anthony (1866; Nationalmuseum, Stockholm). Renoir and Sisley remained in the area, spending the fall and winter of 1865 at Marlotte, after Bazille and Monet had returned to Paris. According to Joanne's guide, Marlotte was frequented almost exclu- sively by landscape artists. The Gon- courts described it as "the chosen birth- place of modern landscape."' Village Street of Marlotte was one of Sisley's two entries for the Salon of 1866. A modest painting, it bears close relationships to works by the Barbizon painters that Sisley so admired, espe- cially those of Jules Dupre and Corot. Dupre's emotional attachment to his subject matter, however, seems to have been eradicated in Sisley's painting, which shows the beginning of a kind of objective detachment from the scene depicted. The gray-gold light of early fall reveals the starkness of a mundane cor- ner of the small village. Only the blue- smocked peasant chopping wood on the right breaks the stillness of the aban- doned street. Note 1. Goncourt and Goncourt, 1971, p. 73. 12. Eugene Boudin On the Beach at Trouville (Scene de place a Trouville), i860 Although Boudin initially based his own paintings on those of the Barbizon paint- ers, whose work he exhibited in his fram- ing and stationery shop in Honfleur, he quickly found his own metier painting en plein air in and around the towns on the Normandy coast. He felt that landscape artists could achieve an honesty and "vividness of touch" only by "painting outside, by experiencing nature in all its variety, its freshness."' Combining this concern for the out-of-doors with a depiction of fashionable contemporary society, Boudin's beach scenes added a wondrous dimension to the expanding genre of landscape. In fact, the artist became rather sensitive, indeed defen- sive, about his chosen subjects: ...those middle class people who are stroll- ing the jetty at the hour of sunset, have they no right to be fixed upon canvas, to be brought to our attention. ..these people who leave their offices and cubbyholes?- Boudin's On the Beach at Trouville encapsulates Charles Baudelaire's con- cerns for painting "modern life," dis- cussed at length in his article for Le Figaro, "Peintre de la vie moderne." For both the painter and the author moder- nity was "the ephemeral, the fugitive, the half of art whose other half is the eternal and the immutable."' In Boudin's paint- ings, all these aspects are combined with the verisimilitude in which the artist delighted. Here, chicly dressed middle- class people are enjoying a day at one of the great resorts on the Normandy coast. Boudin has enlivened the flat coastal set- ting, created in a facture finely filtered through the experience of paintings by Courbet, whom he had met and escorted around Le Havre the previous year. The horizontality of the beach and sky (which occupies three-quarters of the picture) is enlivened by a controlled dis- position of figures across its surface and by carefully placed patches of pure color. The whites, blues, and reds of the figures provide a lively counterpoint which ani- mates the canvas in a way totally unique to Boudin. Notes l.Rewald, 1980, p. 38. 2. Ibid. 3. Baudelaire, 1970, p. 13. 74 A DAY IN THE COUNTRY No. 10. Alfred Sisley Avenue of Chestnut Trees at La Celle-Saint Cloud, 1867 THE FRENCH LANDSCAPE SENSIBILITY 7S No. 11. Alfred Sisley Village Street of Marlotte. 1 866 7e A DAY IN THE COUNTRY No. 12. Eugene Boudin Os THE BtACH AT TrOUVILLE, 1860 THE FRENCH LANDSCAPE SENSIBILITY 77 The Cradle of Impressionism THE Seine winds in long, meandering loops west of Paris, skirting the hills at Sevres and pushing into the Parisis plains near the village of Asnieres. It then swoops back to Argenteuil and runs a straight course until it arrives at Bougival, where it bends again, discouraged by the rising terrain that runs from that small town to Saint-Germain-en- Laye. Nestled in these softly contoured hills are the villages of Bougival, Louveciennes, and Marly-le-Roi (map 5). The landscape in and around these villages was truly the cradle of Impressionism. Here, in the summer of 1869, Monet, Renoir, and Pissarro worked together for the first time at rendering the same outdoor view and began to forge the shared, informal, plein-air aesthetic of Impressionist land- scape painting. If — as Arnold Hauser and many students of the movement have long maintained — Impressionism was an urban art form, born around the tables of the Cafe Guerbois in Paris during the second half of the 1860s, it was in the suburban countryside west of the capital that the notions of mod- ern painting discussed in Paris were first tested. The place names of this re- gion— Bougival, Louveciennes, Voisins, Port-Marly, Saint-Michel, and Marly-le-Roi — appear over and over in the tides of the paintings we have come to associate with the beginnings of Impressionism. Monet moved to Bougival with his mistress, Camille Doncieux, and their son, Jean, in June 1869. Renoir spent that summer in nearby Ville- d'Avray, a favorite locale of Corot's, but came frequently to visit both Monet in Bougival and his own mother and grandmother, who owned a house at 1 8, route de Versailles in Louveciennes. The two painters worked together inten- sively during September, when their great series of landscapes of the Seine along the He de Croissy were painted (nos. 13-14). It is possible that Monet 79 Map 5. Bougival, Port-Marly, and Environs, i- fi^e&. and Renoir had come to this region to join Pissarro, who may have moved from Pontoise — where he had hved for several years — to Louveciennes as early as the fall of 1868, but who was definitely in residence by May 1869 (fig. 14). The Pissarro family rented part of a large house called the Maison Retrou at 22, route de Versailles, and Monet stayed with them during Decem- ber 1869, when he and Pissarro worked together just as Monet and Renoir had done earlier (nos. 15—16). Sisley may have visited them that winter and definitely moved to a house on the rue de la Princesse in the hamlet of Louve- ciennes called Voisins in the summer or early fall of 1870. In the end, of all the painters Sisley was the most faithful to this area. Renoir was there scarcely more than a month, and Monet left after less than six months. Pissarro lived in Louveciennes for nearly a year and a half, but Sisley returned again and again from 1870 until at least 1878. For this reason, the majority of the paintings in this section are by him. Why did the Impressionists come to this particular area? The villages southwest of Paris near the forest of Fontainebleau had been claimed long before by the Barbizon school. Chintreuil and a group of his friends had colo- nized the charming, hilly region near Igny and Bievre, southwest of Paris. Daubigny had moved to Auvers, northwest of the capital, where he was vis- ited by Daumier, Corot, and many others. And Corot and his students had claimed the landscape just west of Paris near Ville-d'Avray, Sevres, and La Celle-Saint-Cloud. Indeed, landscape painters tended more often than not to colonize the countryside in groups, as if to guard themselves from "the na- tives," and the Impressionists were no exception. For this reason, the land- scapes painted by them around Bougival and Marly have a collectivity of both style and subject. The Impressionists' reasons for their choice of sites were never clearly 80 A DAY IN THE COUNTRY stated, but it is not terribly difficult to guess what the attractions of this Fig. U. Pissarro, Winter Landscape, 1869. particular area would have been. First, Bougival is only 17 kilometers from O'' °n canvas. 38.3 x 46.3 cm Walters Art \ • 1 • J J ij 1 ■ u • -.u- TA - i ™ Gallery, Baltimore. Photo: Walters Art the capital — indeed, one could reach it on the train within liJ minutes rrom q^]^^/ the Gate Saint-Lazare. Second, it was well known enough among mid-cen- '- tury landscape painters — particularly Celestin Francois and Charles-Fran- Fig. 15. Renoir, La GrenonHlere, 1869. Oil qois Nanteuil — that one could feel comfortable working there. And third, it on canvas. 66 x 81 cm. Nationalmuseum, was already famous. Gerard de Nerval had extolled its charms as early as Stockholm. Photo: Nationalmuseum. 1855 in his Promenades et souvenirs, saying that, by living in nearby Saint- Germain-en-Laye, "one has the resources of the city, and one is almost com- pletely in the country."' And Emile de La Bedolliere, in his famous book Histoire des environs de nouveau Paris, published in the early 1860s with illustrations by Gustave Dore, treated the town of Bougival as an artists' colony, mentioning the hordes of artists and writers who "come together each year in Bougival."- In 1867, just two years before the arrival of Monet and Renoir, the novelist Victorien Sardou was asked to contribute an essay on the environs of Paris to a vast guidebook, Paris Guide par les principaux ecrivains et artistes de la France, which was published in connection with the "Exposition Uni- verselle" in Paris during 1867. His offering, entitled "Paris en Promenade — Louveciennes, Marly," commenced with this resounding paragraph: Are you an intrepid hiker?... Does the bright sunshine invite you into the fields? And do you want to get to know the most picturesque and the richest region in all the environs of Paris, one [that is] justly praised? If so, get up early in the morning and go to Bougival, and, after a big lunch on the banks of the river, proceed to Marly-le-Roi by the road through Louveciennes, the route of schoolboys.' There are countless ways in which Sardou's delightful text leads us directly "into" the Impressionist paintings we know so well today. Certain phrases, sentences, and even entire paragraphs evoke the landscapes of Sisley, Pissarro, and Monet, almost as if Sardou's prose was written after — rather than before — the pictures were made. Particular roads — the rue de la Princesse on which Sisley lived and from which he painted so many land- scapes, for example — are mentioned lovingly by Sardou. The painters almost seem to have been illustrating his observations of the river's banks, of the THE CRADLE OF IMPRESSION'ISM 81 ^vft^ '^:>^5fb Fig. 16. Jules Pelcoq (French), At La Grenouillere, n.d. Woodcut from Le Monde illnstre, 1868. play of light and shade along a hillside, and of the houses on the slope near Louveciennes. Pissarro's Vietv of Loiiveciennes (1869; The National Gallery, London) could be coupled with the following passage from Sardou's text: On one side, grape arbors; on the other, a hollow abounding in greenery; in front, houses lost in the foliage. ..and, crowning it all, the beautiful arcades of the aque- duct, which give the landscape a grand, Italian air. In sum, the most wonderful arrival in the country that one can find! Wherever you turn your eyes, the lines of the terrain fold in harmonious undulations with the most beautiful contrasts of light and foliage. Everywhere there are space, fresh air, country smells, and the great silence made up — I don't know how — of a thousand sounds that result from the freedom of the sky, the vigor of the wind, the calls of the birds,. ..all of which tell you clearly: "Here is a true village! You can enter.. .take off your clothes if you are hot. ..sing if you are happy.. .you will offend no one in this place!""* This very freedom and the ease of living in such places as Bougival, Louveciennes, and Marly clearly appealed not only to the Impressionists who spent time in these places, but also, as we have seen, to their countrymen who came from Paris for the summer, a weekend, or the day (see above, II). In fact, these charming villages were not simple rural settlements, but rather subur- ban communities in which many Parisians owned country residences and from which others commuted to work on the train and omnibus. Their inhabitants were not — strictly speaking — villagers; they were not traditional peasants, small shopkeepers, or farmers. Indeed, much of the real estate in this region was owned by absentee landlords who had little expectation of economic gain from this ownership and who possessed either large country residences with considerable grounds or small houses perched precariously on small parcels of land. Statistics indicate clearly that such people swelled the villages durmg the summers and on weekends while the population of permanent residents of Bougival, for instance, actually declined from 2,316 in 1868 to 2,086 in 1878." The "weekenders" hired local people as servants and companions, and some of them owned small restaurants or commercial A DA-l IN THE COLTNTRY Figs. 17-19. Henri Bevan (French, b. 1825), The Machine de Marly; Aqueduct at Louveciennes; Pool at Marly, all 1870. Albumen prints from glass negatives. Each 12.5 X 16.5 cm. Private Collection, Paris. Photos: Musee d'Orsay, Paris. THE CRADLE OF IMPRESSIONISM 83 businesses. There was also a considerable population of truck gardeners who provided fruit and vegetables on a small scale to the Parisian gentry as well as to the central markets in Paris, Les Halles. In the very diversity of their econo- mies and their dependence upon urban civilization, these suburban villages were quite different from the "peasant" villages around the forest of Fon- tainebleau or in the Vexin plains near Auvers painted by members of the school of Pontoise (see below, III/5). The two most important — and most often represented — sites in the landscape around Bougival in the mid-nineteenth century were the Seine around the restaurant called La Grenouillere near Bougival (no. 14) and the park of the ruined Chateau de Marly at Marly-le-Roi (see above, II). Each of these sites was a powerful symbol for Frenchmen — the first, of the possibility of unrestrained "rural" leisure made accessible by train travel (fig. 15), and the second, of the greatness of the French past. La Grenouillere was men- tioned in every Second Empire and early Third Republic (1870-1940) guide to the environs of Paris as a delightfully noisy — and more than occasionally rowdy — place to eat, swim, boat, and drink that was both inexpensive and easily accessible from Paris. La Grenouillere literally floated on the Seine, and one could rent boats and small bathing houses in which to change clothing and enjoy oneself. Popular prints roughly contemporary with the period of the Impressionists illustrate the charms of the place. For example, one from the mass-circulation periodical Le Monde illustre of 1868 (fig. 16) shows a group of rather vulgar — and probably somewhat drunk — people cavorting in the water near the restaurant. Another, from the Illustrated London News of 1875, is somewhat less satirical and indicates clearly that the fame of this small place had already spread to England. La Grenouillere was among a handful of places around Paris that were known to practically everyone who lived there; it was the Moulin de la Galette of the suburbs. The most notable aspect of La Grenouillere during the nineteenth cen- tury was its immorality. It was a place in which people from various social classes could meet in utter anonymity, unafraid of the prying eyes of friends or neighbors. For that reason, and because of the quantities of alcohol con- sumed and the rounds of dressing and undressing before and after swimming, La Grenouillere came to be associated with prostitution and loose morality, as the prmt from Le Monde illustre makes clear. The lengthiest and most fascinating proof of this association is a vivid, if somewhat prim, passage from Maupassant's novel La Femme de Paul: One senses there, even through one's nostrils, all the scum of the world, ail the most distinguished riffraff, all the moldiness of Parisian society: a melange of pretenders, ham actors, lowly journalists, gentlemen guardians, worm-eaten speculators, debauchers, decayed bon vivants; thronged among all the most sus- pect of people, partly known, pardy lost, partly acknowledged, and partly dishon- ored, crooks, petty thieves, purchasers of women, captains of industry with distin- guished airs, who seem to say: "Anyone who treats me like a rascal will get busted!" The park of the Chateau de Marly, the favored country retreat of Louis XIV, was the opposite of La Grenouillere in every way, at once grander and quieter. Praised most fervently in the nineteenth century by Sardou, the park had been designed by Le Notre in the late seventeenth century as part of the great aquatic system that brought water from the Seine up the hills by way of the tnachine de Marly, a series of huge water wheels only just rebuilt 84 A DAY IN THE COLINTRY by Napoleon III (fig. 17), through the aqueduct also designed by Le Notre at Louveciennes (fig. 18) to the great storage pools at the Chateau de Marly (fig. 19). These eventually fed the fountains of Versailles. The chateau and its numerous outbuildings had been destroyed during the Revolution, and nine- teenth-century visitors to the park walked through a silent, deserted land- scape which spoke as poetically of the failure of the aristocracy as of its bril- liance. The massive Baroque garden scheme lent a distinctly aristocratic character to the landscape around Port-Marly, Louveciennes, and Marly-le- Roi. The route de Versailles, on which both Pissarro and Renoir lived, for example, had been designed as a royal road for the carriages which took the court from Saint-Germain-en-Laye to the Chateau de Marly and on to Ver- sailles. Its straight, tree-lined character was at odds with the crooked paths and huddled roofs of the village of Louveciennes, which it passed. The aque- duct, painted by Pissarro and Sisley (The Aqueduct of Marly [1874; The To- ledo Museum of Art]), dominated the landscape from Bougival to Saint- Germain-en-Laye. Thus the paintings by Pissarro and Monet of the route de Versailles (no. 15) and by Sisley of the machine de Marly, the aqueduct, and the pools at Marly-le-Roi (no. 21) are unimaginable without Louis XIV and his planners (see above, II). The album of an important amateur photographer, Henry Bevan, who lived in Louveciennes in the 1860s and '70s, casts an interesting light on the subject matter of paintings made at precisely the same moment by the Impressionists (see below, V). Called Photographies, Louveciennes et Bougival par Henry Bevan, the album, made in 1870 and still in the collec- tion of Bevan's family in France, was a private attempt to record all aspects of the landscape in and around which another family, the Mallets — to which Bevan was related by marriage — and their friends maintained large country properties. In many ways Bevan was an archetypal "new" inhabitant of the Louveciennes region. He was wealthy, having recently married one of the heiresses to a banking fortune; he lived in a large compound owned by his wife's family in the newly built-up region near the Place de TEurope in Paris; and he commuted on weekends back and forth to Louveciennes. He had learned to photograph in the 1850s and was already an excellent technician when he began his series of photographs of the "cradle of Impressionism." He certainly knew the great photographic critic Francis Wey, who also kept a Figs. 20-21. Bevan, Residence of Horace Mallet; The lie de Croissy: La Grenouillere, both 1870. Albumen prints from glass nega- tives. Each 12.5 x 16.5 cm. Private Collec- tion, Paris. Photos: Musee d'Orsay, Paris. THE CRADLE OF IMPRESSIONISM 85 Figs. 22-23. Bevan, Port-Marly; Banks of the Seine, both 1870. Albumen prints from glass negatives. Each 12.5 x 16.5 cm. Private Collection, Paris. Photos: Musee d'Orsay, Paris. house in Louveciennes and had written perceptively about landscape photog- raphy in the 18505." It is unlikely that Bevan knew any of the Impressionist painters personally — he was wealthy enough that his circle would most probably not have overlapped with theirs. Yet he surely saw them as he prowled through the landscape they were painting in search of photographic motifs. What is surprising, therefore, is the extent to which "his" Louveciennes and "theirs" differed. Bevan's photographic album begins with — and had its social roots in — the country residence of his father-in-law, the great banker Horace Mal- let (fig. 20). Dominating its immense, exotic gardens on a slight rise, the mas- sive, commanding dwelling of three floors had a large, recently built addition. Later plates in the book show its gardens, beautifully clipped and main- tained, and the country residence of Bevan's sister-in-law. Mile. Mallet, who owned a slightly less imposing dwelling with its own garden and a wonderful orangery. Then come two photographs of the superb garden of a M. de Bourrevilles. Fully eight of the twenty-eight landscape photographs in this book represent the private properties of wealthy landowners from Paris. Clearly, this is not the kind of landscape subject painted by the Impres- sionists. Indeed, Sisley, the only painter who did include several of the large country properties of Louveciennes in his painted landscapes, usually showed them as they could be seen from public roadways, sitting comfortably in the middle grounds of their landscapes.^ In the end, one must conclude that there was a social and economic gulf between the photographer Bevan and the Impressionist painters, his exact contemporaries, and that this gulf in itself caused their differing responses to the same landscape. The walled gardens of the haute bourgeoisie were not open to the Impressionists in those years. Bevan did wander outside the carefully maintained compounds of his family and friends, however, and, on these wanderings, made landscape pho- tographs of sites that could equally have been — or that were — painted by the Impressionists. For example, he photographed La Grenouillere, perhaps the only site depicted by the photographer, Monet, Renoir, Pissarro, aitd Sisley. But Bevan's carefully labeled view (fig. 21) shows us the restaurant from the Bougival side of the river, and we see it as merely one element in a spacious river landscape. It was the river that was important to Bevan, not La 86 A DAY IN THE COUNTRY Grenouillere, and he made a number of other photographs of the Seine that demonstrate this interest (figs. 22-23). These photographs come closer to the paintings of the Impressionists than any others by Bevan and provide evidence of the deep affection for the national river that was shared by them all (see above, II, and below, III/4). In spite of this particular rapprochement, the photographer's and the painters' landscapes of the Seine are different in every way. Bevan, like many good tourists of his day, traveled with guidebook in hand and was interested in significant historical monuments. He lovingly photographed the churches at Louveciennes and Bougival (fig. 24), both of which were virtually never portrayed by the Impressionists (see above, II), and carefully documented the remains of the great park of the Chateau de Marly. This latter landscape, historically the most important in the region, was practically ignored by the Impressionists. In the end, the vast majority of Bevan's photographs have an "important" subject which embodies his own values — wealth, religion, and commerce. The Impressionists persistently avoided such motifs, implicit or explicit, preferring to follow the lead of painters like Corot and Daubigny and to search out beauty where one would least expect to find it. Their early landscapes pamted in the "cradle of Impressionism," diverse as they seem, are almost aggressively ordinary, and they are as important for what they omit- ted as for what they contain. More often than not, the painters denied the motifs photographed by Bevan in their early paintings, turning their own backs to them (no. 21), screening them behind trees (nos. 13, 19, 72), or simply organizing compositions so that they are just to the left or right of the view included in the frame (nos. 59, 63-64, 69) — a view that is intentionally mundane. — R. B. Fig. 24. Bevan, Church in Bougival, 1870. Albumen print from glass negative. 12.5 x 16.5 cm. Private Collection, Paris. Photo: Musee d'Orsay, Paris. Notes 1. See de Nerval, 1855. 2. de La Bedolliere, early 1860s, p. 85. 3. La Croix (ed.), 1867, vol. II, p. 1455. 4. Ibid., pp. 1456-1457. 5. A.Joanne, 1881, p. 167. 6. In the Bulletin of the Societe Fran^aise de Photographic and in La Lumiere. 7. There is only one case of correspondence between the country-house photographs of Bevan and the landscape paintings of the Impressionists, and that involves a photograph by Bevan called Luciennes, Property of M. de Bourrevilles and a painting by Sisley entitled The Duck Pond at Louveciennes (1873; Private Collection). Although their compositions are different, their subjects and points of view are the same. Perhaps Sisley was given permission to enter the park of M. de Bourrevilles to paint a landscape that IS otherwise unique in his oeuvre. We can feel secure in saying that Bevan knew M. de Bourrevilles and that his photograph was made as a record of their social connections. THE CRADLE OF IMPRESSIONISM 87 13. Claude Monet The Bridge at Bougival (Le Pont de Bougival), 1869 Monet seems already to have been paint- ing in Bougival by June 1869. The first of his Bougival canvases to be sold, The Bridge at Bougival is among the largest, most traditionally composed landscapes he painted during 1869—70. For his mo- tif, Monet chose the small bridge from the He de Croissy in the river to the town of Bougival that had been inaugurated on November 7, 1858 (fig. 6). He con- centrated his attention less on the archi- tecture of the bridge itself than on the spatial relationship between the unpaved road across the bridge to the town be- yond and the road leading down to the river. One would have seen such a land- scape at the end of a day at La Grenouil- lere, just as one was returning to Bougival to catch the train to Paris. The composition of this painting was conceived along strictly geometric lines and relates, in this way, to such ear- lier paintings as the Terrace at Sainte- Adresse (no. 5). The painting is divided in half both vertically and horizontally, and the horizon line was placed exactly one third of the distance from the bot- tom of the painting. The trees, fences, and figures were each carefully posi- tioned to make the space of the land- scape totally legible. This composition has its most important antecedents in the paintings Corot made at nearby Ville- d'Avray,^ and one can point to any of a number of examples known to Monet. Perhaps the closest is the famous Yille d'Avray, The House of Cabassud (1865— 70; Musee du Louvre, Paris), but even this comparison reveals the extent to which Monet was more insistent in his application of rigid structural principles. Like many landscapes which record the humble sites of the He de France, this one has no true subject. Monet was care- ful to balance the various elements of the landscape so that one would not domi- nate the others and did not include a sin- gle historically important form. Indeed, he positioned himself so that the spire of the church in Bougival, the only archi- tecturally remarkable form in the land- scape (fig. 24), was screened by the trees. In his de-emphasis of this church, an important local monument, Monet not only projected his own ideolog>' onto the landscape, but also indicated clearly that he was not interested in creating a topo- graphical picture dependent upon an architecturally unique building to give it a "sense of place" (see above, I— II). Monet sold this picture in 1870 to the dealer pere Martin, who supported both him and Pissarro; it was not pub- lished until 1921 nor exhibited until 1949 (see below, IV). Note l.Seitz, 1960, p. 82. 14. Claude Monet Bathing at La Grenouillere fL£s Bains de la Grenouillere), 1869 Monet worked actively with Renoir (fig. 15) on a group of paintings of La Grenouillere during August and Septem- ber. Monet himself referred to the two he did as "miserable sketches,"' in spite of the fact that he signed them (probably later) and that one of them (The Metro- politan Museum of Art, New York) was in the collection of no less a connoisseur than Manet. This latter painting has long been an icon in the history of Impres- sionism and has been published in- numerable times m juxtaposition with Renoir's painting of the same subject (Nationalmuseum, Stockholm). Both these compositions are centered on a cir- cular swimming platform known as "Le Camembert" and connected both to the shore of the He de Croissy and to the floating restaurant. Unlike The Bridge at Bougival (no. 13), the subject of Bathing at La Grenouillere is essentially without precedent. There are no major pictures by Corot, Daubigny, or Courbet that re- late to it, and it comes closest icono- graphically to beach pictures painted by Monet's teacher and mentor, Boudin, on the north coast (no. 12). Both Monet and Boudin approached the subject of bathing with a fair degree of primness and from a distance. This painting has a considerably more informal and aaive composition than its counterpart in New York. Painted from the restaurant platform it- self, it shows a raised wooden walkway in front of which is a delightful still life of rowboats waiting to be rented and behind which are changing rooms, also for rent. Again, as was most often the case during the Bougival period, Monet divided the composition vertically and horizontally into halfs and thirds, and important forms were anchored to this structure (no. 13). In this way, the world's constant flux — of reflections, moving boats, jostling figures, and rus- tling trees — is held in check, and there is a sense of activity arrested and con- trolled by the artist (see above, I). There are many parallels between the depictions of La Grenouillere in popular prints and Monet's paintings, parallels which indicate that the prints (fig. 16) acted as a collective — if indirect — source for both his and Renoir's render- ings. However, the boldness and rigor of Monet's touch as well as the strongly geometric division of the picture surface are his own, and his pictures of the float- ing restaurant can be contrasted in every way with those of Renoir. For the lat- ter— as for the popular illustrators of the time — the "landscape" of La Grenouillere was essentially a "human- scape," a populated realm in which the artist gave himself over fervently to the description of moving figures. Whereas Monet's thickest, most confidently applied painted marks represent streaks of light reflected in the water or glisten- ing on the wet sides of wooden boats, Renoir's brush lovingly caressed his fig- ures. Anonymous as they are, they have their own actualits- which transcends the landscape in which they move; none are mere staffage figures. On the other hand, Monet's figures merely participate in the spectacle of a lighted landscape, a land- scape without a hierarchy of forms to be interpreted by the painter. The world of bourgeois leisure was painted by him as a unified, vibrating field, as the "field of vision" so often discussed in contem- porary texts about light and human sight. In fact, one thinks less of popular illustrations when one confronts these paintings by Monet than of the lyrics of a famous popular song about Bougival quoted by de La Bedolliere: Of the sun, of the air, of the water That God brings me In this luminous picture In which my view is full, I always see Green fields in front of a blue sky.- NOTES 1. Wildenstein, 1974-79, vol. I, p. 45. 2. de La Bedolliere, early 1860s, p. 87. \ DAY IN THE COLINTRY No. 13. Claude Mcnet The Bridge at Bougivai^ 1869 {detail on p. 78) THE CRADLE OF IMPRESSIONISM 89 15. Claude Monet Versailles Road at Louveciennes — Snow (Route A Louveciennes — effet de NEICE), 1869-70 Monet made two paintings of the route de Versailles in the winter of 1869-70 while staying with the Pissarro family. Their house is clearly visible in this, the more important of the two composi- tions, as the large dwelling on the left side of the street. The Pissarros rented part of this house between the autumn of 1869 and the outbreak of the Franco- Prussian War, at the beginnmg of which they fled from the environs of Paris to safety in Brittany. Pissarro himself worked on several paintings of the street during the same winter. One composi- tion closely related to Monet's Versailles Road at Louveciennes — Snow, and with the same title (Walters Art Gallery, Bal- timore), was purchased from the dealer pere Martin by the Baltimore collector George Lucas in January 1870 (see below, IV). This suggests that Monet's painting might also date from the last months of 1869. In fact, it may record the great snowstorm of 1869 which took place in December and was written about voluminously in the newspapers. Record snowfalls and cold temperatures caused many deaths and forced closure of the Seine in certain sections. This painting, which records the effects of that winter on a "royal road" lined with large and comfortable houses, is less an image of desolation than one of comfort and domesticity in the midst of winter. Literature about the origins of the Impressionist movement in the region of Bougival and Louveciennes customarily has stressed the importance of the rela- tionship between Monet and Renoir at La Grenouillere in the summer of 1869 while downplaying or even dismissing the important relationship between Pissarro and Monet later in that yean This superb canvas makes it clear that both friendships were equally beneficial and significant. Pissarro's major land- scapes from the years before 1869 are strongly composed village scenes painted at midday. Great as they are, they reveal the artist's debt to Corot and to the clas- sical landscape tradition in which the careful arrangement of forms rather than the evocation of forms in time (or weather) is of paramount importance. Monet, on the other hand, had learned from Boudin and Jongkind the secrets of a kind of landscape painting in which time — of the day, of the seasonal cal- endar— played across and changed the forms of nature. Here, he seized the mo- tif of the street with a directness and simplicity that recall his earlier Rue de la Bavolle at Honfleur (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston). Yet in Versailles Road at Louveciennes he painted snow — what Renoir was later to call "the leprosy of nature"' — as it received and reflected the dull light of a winter day. The picture is alive with pinks, mauves, pale yellows, and manifold beiges, all of which Monet manipulated to enliven the whites and mixed off-whites of the snow itself. While Monet was working on this canvas and the related Road at Louveciennes, Fallen Snow, Sunset (1874; Private Collection), Pissarro began a series of paintings of the same road — at different times of the day, in different seasons, and from different directions — that illustrates clearly the effect of his friendship with Monet. Al- though not conceived to be exhibited as a group, Pissarro's canvases were the first careful e.xamination of the temporal structure of a "constant" landscape in the history of art. It is surely no accident that these landscapes about time are cen- tered not on a building, a tree, or a hill, but on a road, along which passed the men, women, and children of Pissarro's dav. This series represents a landscape seen in passing, and it might be said that it would not have been executed had it not been for Monet, who gave his older colleague the necessary push to make him a true Impressionist landscape painter. Note 1. Rewald, 1980, pp. 341-351. 16. Camille Pissarro Landscape at Louveciennes (Autumn) (Le Paysace aux environs de Louveciennes [Automne]), 1869-70 This monumental landscape was prob- ably begun in 1869, shortly after Pissarro moved to Louveciennes and established close contact with Monet. The painting was finished in 1870, per- haps before Pissarro's departure for Brit- tany in July and his eventual trip to Eng- land in December. Both the composition and the patchy, rugged facture indicate that he had just seen such paintings by Monet as The Bridge at Bougival (no. 13) and even the pair of paintings of La Grenouillere (no. 14). When seen in con- trast to the village landscapes of similar dimensions that Pissarro had painted during the previous two years at Pon- toise, this picture appears both more complex and more informally struc- tured. Gone are the rectangular areas of paint that interlock to form a rigorous geometry. Instead, walls, roofs, win- dows, leaves, furrows, manure, plants, figures, and paths are woven together to form a closely modulated texture of overlapping brush strokes. It is as if Pissarro had been released from an aes- thetic prison by his exposure to the work being done by Monet and Renoir, and, in spite of the fact that his desire to struc- ture his painting geometrically remained, it was mitigated in this monumental, decidedly Impressionist canvas by an abandoned recording of a "field of vi- sion" with all its complexity and richness. Pissarro's motif in this painting is a group of kitchen gardens behind a row of small mid-nineteenth-century houses on what was then called the rue des Creux and is today the rue du Marechal Joffre in Louveciennes. Little more than a village path along which humble dwellings had been constructed since the seventeenth century, the rue des Creux contrasted in every way with the royal route de Versailles, which ran roughly parallel to it and on which the painter lived (no. 15). Where the latter was a wide, paved artery linking Louveciennes with Marly-le-Roi and Versailles, the former was unpaved, unimportant, and without a destination other than the fields themselves. It linked Louveciennes only with the land. Pissarro could reach the site of this landscape after a three- minute walk from his own house down the small path visible at the front of the painting, then, as now, called the rue du Pare de Marly. Unlike Monet and Renoir, Pissarro retained a dogged affection for the tradi- 90 A DAY IN THE COUNTRY No. 14. Claude Monet BATHrNG AT La Grenouillere, 1869 (detail on pp. 2-3) THE CRADLE OE IMPRESSIONISM 91 '4k No. 15. Claude Monet Versailles Road at Louveciennes — Snow. 1869-70 92 A DAY IN THE COUNTRY No. 16. Camille Pissarro Landscape at Louveciennes (Autumn), 1869-70 THE CRADLE OF IMPRESSIONISM 93 tional landscape of the rural poor, the majority of Louveciennes' year-round residents. He did not depict the imposing country residences of the nouveau riche — pictured in the distance in works by Sisley' — nor are we given a glimpse of the palatial summer houses built by the aristocracy throughout the region during the eighteenth century, the most famous of which was the chateau built by Claude-Nicolas Ledoux for Mme. du Barry in the hamlet of Voisins. Here, in- stead, we see a simply dressed woman, if not a peasant then a housewife or ag- ricultural worker, in the midst of an utterly mundane landscape. She is carry- ing a bucket and chatting with a young boy — her son? — dressed as a rural la- borer, but carrying his school satchel over his shoulder. While we can easily imagine that she inhabits one of the humble dwellings in the background with her husband and family, the satchel of the boy, tiny and discreet as it is, refers to education and to the expanding lit- eracy— and ambition — of France's rural youth. While Pissarro was celebrating rural France, Monet and Renoir were painting their glorious celebrations of urban leisure at La Grenouillere (no. 14; fig. 15). Although the difference between these two modes may appear to be im- mense, both were equally important components of early Impressionism. The boy's satchel is as powerful a symbol of modernity and freedom as Monet's floating restaurant. Note l.Daulte99, 100, 144. 17. Camille Pissarro Wash House at Bougival (Le Lavoir, Bougival), 1872 This richly detailed view of the Seine at Bougival has traditionally been titled Le Lavoir, Pontoise and has been thought to be a representation of the smaller Oise River near the town of Pontoise, to which Pissarro moved in the late spring of 1872. In fact, comparison with firmly documented pictures by Sisley' as well as with contemporary photographs of the Seine at Bougival by Bevan (see above, III/2) make a correct identification of the site possible. The misidentification, triv- ial as it might appear, is significant because this painting reveals the indus- trial aspect of modernization in this re- gion, an aspect missing from most paint- ings of the area by Pissarro's colleagues. Even Sisley, who painted exactly the same landscape three years later (no. 23), omitted the smokestack from the small factory at the left, as if to de-emphasize the building's industrial nature. Wash House at Bougival makes an explicit visual comparison between handwork and the work of machines. The composition is centered on a float- ing washing facility in the Seine where local women would pay a minimal sum to wash their clothes directly in the river. Presumably, the woman leaning on the tree at the left of the painting is waiting her turn, and her presence, as well as her direct gaze at the viewer, gives greater reality to the hand labor of the silhouet- ted women already in the washing facility. Directly behind them and further along the river is a small factory with its chimney smoking discreetly, and behind it, the village of Bougival. It is autumn or winter; the trees are bare and the barges move slowly up the river under the unmodulated light of a gray day. If this pamting has a subject, it is the delicate balance between man and machine in a changing landscape, recorded with im- mense concentration and refinement. The painting is startling when one considers that it does represent Bougival, but not the Bougival of Sardou, of the painter Fran^ais (see above, III/2), or of Monet and Renoir. It is difficult when looking at the picture to realize that La Grenouillere (no. 14) was no more than 100 yards from this landscape, on the right. Indeed, Pissarro, in his only painted representation of the restaurant (traditionally called The Oise at Pontoise [1872; Location unknown]), included it only as a flimsy building at the right of a balanced composition, the other half of which was dominated by the same fac- tory we see at the center of Wash House at Bougival. Neither 'of these paintings shows us a landscape that conforms to any common notions of rural beauty, nor do they express clearly the modern, na- tionalist desires of Pissarro's France (see above, II). That they were made before and after the disastrous days of the Franco-Prussian War and the Commune, respectively, tells us that certain of Pissarro's anxieties about the modern world played the role of social and aes- thetic constants in his work during a period of rapid political change. Note l.SeeDaulte 159-160. 18. Camille Pissarro Landscape near Louveciennes (Paysage, Louveciennes), c. 1875 Although traditionally dated 1875 and called Paysage a Pontoise, this picture was painted near Louveciennes, prob- ably in 1870, but possibly during Pissarro's second campaign in that re- gion during 1871 and early 1872. Its facture and its palette, which tends toward browns and greens, bear little relationship to those of Pissarro's paint- ings of 1875, many of which were painted with a palette knife and have bright, high-keyed palettes. Although the group of farm buildings chosen as the central motif of Landscape near Louveciennes has not been identified, and the resolute flatness of the site makes it difficult to place near that town's hilly environs, three paintings securely datable to Pissarro's Louveciennes period represent the same buildings.' Of these. Landscape near Louveciennes is closest to the awkwardly titled Path in the Field ivith a Garden Gate at the Right (1871; French and Company, New York). As we have already seen, Pissarro's representations of this region, in their frank acceptance of the traditional rural landscape, contrast with those of his col- leagues. However, this painting, centered on a collection of farm buildings prob- ably built earlier in the century, is not strictly bucolic. Indeed, Pissarro has included a construction site in the fore- ground of the picture where a new build- ing, perhaps a country house, perhaps another farm building, is being built. His insertion of this image of change undercuts the viewer's easy, pleasurable response to the rural landscape as a re- treat from progress and urbanism. Note 1. Pissarro and Vcnturi 83, 126, 190. 94 A DAY IN THE COUNTRY No. 17. Camille Pissarro Wash House at Bougival, 1872 THE CRADLE OE IMPRESSIONISM 95 No. 18. Camille Pissarro Landscape near Louveciennes, c. 1875 96 A DAY IN THE COUNTRY No. 19. Alfred Sisley First Snow at Louveciennes, c. 1870-71 THE CRADLE OF IMPRESSIONISM 97 19. Alfred Sisley First Snow at Louveciennes (Premieres Neices a Louveciennes), C. 1870-71 If this picture was in fact painted during the winter of 1870 in Louveciennes, it re- lates closely to the famous winter land- scapes of the same region by Monet and Pissarro. The earliest of these were most likely begun late in 1869 (no. 15) and finished in 1870. We know, however, that Sisley moved to Louveciennes dur- ing the Commune, and it is more likely that this painting was made in the winter of 1870-71 with Monet's and Pissarro's earlier landscapes in mind. It is even pos- sible that Sisley saw the many paintings by Pissarro left in his house in Louve- ciennes when his family fled hastily to Brittany m 1870 (see above, III/2). Yet whatever its true relationship to the win- ter landscapes by his friends, First Snow at Louveciennes is among the most mas- terful works in this genre of the early 1870s. For his motif Sisley chose the small road called the rue de la Paix, which led into the village of Louveciennes from the hamlet of Voisins, where he lived. There are no remarkable buildings included; indeed, the bell tower of the small church at Louveciennes is screened by the trees at the left (see above, 1II/2). This land- scape, like those already mentioned of Monet and Pissarro, is a celebration of what was, in fact, a small road which was "enlarged" by Sisley to cover most of the picture's foreground. The humble seventeenth- and eighteenth-century stone and stucco buldings of the village huddle in a picturesque jumble at the end of the road. Only the clearly articulated plane of the house at the left gives strength to the middle ground. There is a delicate tension created by the contrast between the densely concentrated village and the spreading, spacious arcs of the road; the composition invites us to look at a small village from the perspective of the world "beyond" it. 20. Alfred Sisley The Seine at Bougival (La Seine a Bougival), 1872-73 "Totally accessible as it is, you will leave unwillingly the banks of the river [at Bougival], so charming, so luminous, so verdant...."' Sardou, who wrote those delightful words in his 1867 guide to Paris and its environs (see above, 111/2), surely must have been describing the part of the Seine painted early in the 1870s by Sisley. In this and another ver- sion of the composition (National- museum, Stockholm), Sisley painted the river in one of its few unspoiled reaches near Paris. Here, there is nothing but water, trees, and sky. No boats ruffle the placid waters. No newly built country houses disgorge noisy swimmers and boating parties into the water. The river is even tranquil enough that water plants grow along its banks at the left. This river-scape harks back to those of Dau- bigny, who worked near and far away from Paris on scenes of equivalently e.x- quisite natural beauty. It is difficult to imagine when look- ing at this painting that the Seine near Bougival was actually a busy waterway, along which hundreds of barges and steamboats passed on their way to the increasingly industrialized river ports of Argenteuil, Courbevoie, and, of course, Paris. Just behind Sisley, as he faced the He de Croissy looking downstream, was not only the town of Bougival with its barge-filled banks, but also the great machine de Marly (fig. 17). Knowing its location, a Parisian of Sisley's day would have found this intimate and bucolic painting all the more poignant because of the fragility of the landscape it depicts in contrast to the liveliness of that upon which the artist turned his back. Note 1. La Croix (ed.), 1867, vol. II, p. 1455. 21. Alfred Sisley Watering Place at Marly (L'Abreuvoir de Marly), 1875 The tiny town of Marly-le-Roi was Sisley's territory. Avoided by Monet, Re- noir, and even Pissarro, it clustered around the edges of the great Pare de Marly (see above, III/2). Although Pissarro lived no more than a ten-minute walk away from Marly-le-Roi, if he went there, he failed to paint it. On the other hand, there are at least 30 paintings of the town recorded in the Sisley literature, and others will undoubtedly come to light. Marly-le-Roi was important less for its appearance in the last half of the nine- teenth century than for its history. The many guidebooks to the environs of Paris written in the second half of the nineteenth century make it clear that one visited Marly-le-Roi not simply because it was charming, but because it was the site of the Chateau de Marly. Both Sardou and Joanne expatiated in elegant prose upon the life of the court there during the seventeenth and early eigh- teenth centuries and contrasted that world with the charming, but humble, village which managed to survive after the court left. Sardou, after describing Le Notre's brilliant gardens at the height of their glory, made this contrast perfectly clear by stating: "One single pool from the side of the second parterre remains: the women from Louveciennes and Marly come there to wash their clothes".' It is just that pool that Sisley painted in Watering Place at Marly. His painting is not a royal landscape, nor is it a nostal- gic look at a great architectural ruin in the midst of its decadence. Rather, it is a celebration of the ordinary beauties of the He de France on a fresh, cool summer day. Surrounded by an unpaved road which swoops into the foreground, the pool dominates the left half of this and another landscape of 1875 by Sisley (The Pool at Marly, Snow [Private Collec- tion]). It is most emphatically not the central motif of the landscape. Indeed, Sisley was just as captivated by the clouds, the light playing on the white plaster houses, and the shadows that dappled the road as he was by the remains of the great pool itself. Because of its historical importance, most visitors to Marly would have preferred to view the pool from the town, looking into the forest of the Pare de Marly, as Sisley him- self did while painting in the dead of winter in 1875.- More frequently, how- ever, he turned his back on that charm- ing and verdant landscape, choosing in- stead a view which exuded a maximum amount of nervous energy- as light played actively across many diverse forms. Notes 1. La Croix (ed.), 186"^ 2. Daulte 152, 154. 1464. 98 A DAY IN THE COLIKTRY r ^■ h^^A^U', No. 20. Alfred Sisley The Seine AT BouGivAL, 1872-73 THE CRADLE OF IMPRESSIONISM 99 .■i^it No. 21. Alfred Sisley Watering Place at Marly, 1875 100 A DAY IN THE COUNTRY No. 22. Alfred Sisley Streetin Louveciennes, 1872-73 THE CRADLE OF IMPRESSIONISM 101 22. Alfred Sisley Street in Louveciennes {La Route a Louveciennes), 1872-73 Sisley either retained for a long period the house he rented in Voisins in 1871 or rented it repeatedly for several years after that. (Because he rented the prop- erty, his name was never registered in the official cadastral records, and it is there- fore impossible to trace his movements exactly.) It is difficult to fix his undated paintings of the area in time because he, like Pissarro, returned to his motifs through the years. Street in Louve- ciennes has traditionally been dated to 1875 because of its relationship to another landscape, A Street in Louve- ciennes at Evening Time (Private Collec- tion, Paris), depicting the same motif that was signed and dated in that year by Sisley himself. However, the carefully controlled facture and tightly ordered composition suggest a date earlier in the decade, perhaps nearer to the time when Sisley first moved to the Louveciennes region. One of the artist's favorite motifs in the 1870s was the rural cafe or restau- rant. This picture represents the Cafe Mite in Voisins very near the painter's house. Sisley painted this restaurant from the other direction in 1874 {A Road in Louveciennes [Private Collec- tion, Paris]) and it has been identified by Daulte as the painter's home for several months of that year.' His decision to paint such buildings repeatedly has clear precedents in seventeenth-century Dutch art, in which rural inns and taverns were frequently chosen as the locus for land- scape compositions. Numerous passages in both rural guidebooks and publica- tions about landscape painting by writ- ers from Alfred Sensier to Henriet cele- brated the food and conviviality of rural inns. Landscape painters lived, ate, and drank in such places, often decorating the walls as payment to a generous owner. A day in the country was not complete unless one dined well at an inn, generally for a price significantly lower than at a comparable restaurant in Paris. Note 1. Daulte 149. 23. Alfred Sisley The Seine at Port-Marly, Piles of Sand {La Seine a Port-Marly — tas de sable), 1875 This commanding landscape was painted at nearly the same place on the river where Pissarro had stood to paint Wash House at Bougival three years ear- lier (no. 17). The building to the far left of this composition is the factory — with its smokestack omitted — on which Pissarro had centered his composition. Sisley painted two other landscapes from the same spot in 1875,' one of which includes the smokestack. The Seine at Port-Marly, Piles of Sand is rare among Sisley's landscapes — indeed, among Impressionist landscapes in general — in its attention to the dredg- ing of the Seine. More than any other Impressionist, Sisley was fascinated by the complexity of river life. Less inter- ested in pleasure craft and their pas- sengers than his friend Monet (nos. 39- 43), Sisley preferred to render the eco- nomically important boat life of the Seine — from ferries to flat barges and motor tugs. In this painting the shipping lanes in the middle of the river are being dredged by men in small boats; the piles of sand at the side of the river were intended for sale to building contractors and gardeners. The poles in the river were used to tie the boats as they arrived from the dredging area, and the men working in the boats in the middle ground of Sisley's painting are lowering buckets into the river. Interestingly, these boats are not markedly different from the rowboats available to be rented for pleasure in the foreground of Monet's Bathing at La Grenouillere (no. 14); this may indicate that such craft had varying seasonal uses. A contemporary land- scape photograph by Bevan (see above, III/2) also includes the piles of sand (fig. 23). As if to mitigate against our "read- ing" this painting as a simple document of river life, Sisley chose a brilliant and unusual palette. In fact, it may have been the bright, almost turquoise color of the water as it contrasted with the yellow- beige of the sand that attracted Sisley to the subject initially. Yet, for all its beauty, this is a difficult landscape, in which we can observe a pre-industrial working population struggling to control the river and keep it navigable. The painting proves very clearly that pictures of this region, the cradle of Impressionism, must be understood as pictorial medita- tions upon the modernization of France (no. 16). Note 1. Daulte 177-178. 24. Alfred Sisley The Seine at Port-Marly (BORDS DE LA SeINE A PorT-MaRLy), 1875 Sisley painted this unproblematically ru- ral landscape on the banks of the Seine near Port-Marly, where he went many times in 1875 and 1876. The small boat in the foreground of this picture is filled with sand dredged from the Seine in order to keep its channel open for the extensive commercial barge traffic between Le Havre and Paris. On the basis of this motif the picture could al- most be paired with the identically sized Seine at Port-Marly, Piles of Sand (no. 23), where similar boats negotiate the river. In fact, it is likely that The Seine at Port-Marly was painted from a spot very near that at which Sisley stood to paint the other picture. Instead of directing his attention down the river here, to render it as a spacious highway of water, Sisley adopted a planar compositional strategy, representing a group of farm buildings on the island running down the center of the Seine between Bougival and Port- Marly. The viewer seems almost to be floating, and the painting can be inter- preted as a stable view perceived from a watery vantage point. Thus it has prece- dents in Daubigny's Boat Trip (1862) and in many paintings by Monet made from his floating studio at Argenteuil (nos. 39-43). This composition calls to mind the opening pages of Flaubert's L'Education sentimentale, in which the young hero pursues the alluring Mme. Arnoux on a boat to Paris, observing all the while the inaccessible beauties of the traditional 102 A DAY IN THE COUNTRY 4 I t ip^- i i^- No. 23. Alfred Sisley The Seine at Port-.Mablv, Piles of Sand, 1 875 THE CRADLE OF IMPRESSIONISM 103 landscape. Like Flaubert, who preferred bourgeois subjects, even in the provinces, Sisley rarely painted such a completely rural subject as this detached farm, gravitating instead toward suburban landscapes with country houses, rural paths, orchards, and outdoor res- taurants. Interestingly, The Seine at Port- Marly was signed and dated twice by Sisley. When he finished the painting he signed it at the lower right corner. After- wards its first owner, Comte Doria, had it placed in a smaller frame, probably to pair it with another painting of slightly narrower dimensions. At this point Sisley re-signed the painting so that his signature would appear clearly to the viewer. 25. Alfred Sisley The Versailles Road, Louveciennes {La Route de Versailles), 1875 As we have seen, the route de Versailles, a popular motif of Impressionist paint- ings, was constructed as part of Le Notre's vast scheme for transporting water from the Seine to the gardens of the Chateau de Marly and, eventually, Versailles (see above, III/2). By 1700 the road had become the major route connecting the town of Port-Marly with Versailles. It was heavily traveled throughout the nineteenth century, and both Pissarro and Renoir lived on it for short periods of time. There are Impres- sionist representations of virtually all aspects of the road: houses, trees, rural inns, and travelers seen from every imag- inable viewpoint in every season and at many times of day. Indeed, the route de Versailles is to the Impressionist iconog- raphy of roads what the Seine is to its iconography of rivers (see above, II and below, III/4). In this gentle summer landscape Sisley chose to emphasize the enormous chestnut trees which bordered the route de Versailles at irregular intervals. Originally lined on both sides with trees, the road was heavily built up in the 1800s, and many of them were cut down to be replaced by dwellings. In the paint- ing two majestic trees tower over the tiny inhabitants and the informal group of houses in the middle ground. Their fo- liage, pruned to prevent lateral growth which would impair the view of the road, seems almost to tremble in the breeze of a hazy day. 26. Alfred Sisley Flood at Port-Marly (LTnondation A Port-Marly), 1876 Flood at Port-Marly is the largest — and finest — of three identically composed versions of this subject, the first of which, identically titled (Private Collec- tion, Paris) was painted in 1871—72. The chance to make architecture appear to dissolve by surrounding it on all sides with atmosphere and water was clearly irresistible to Sisley, and, after experi- encing the flooding of the Seine in 1872, he returned to Port-Marly for a pro- tracted period in 1876. In that year, not only did he paint six landscapes repre- senting the flooded river, but he also painted the landscape before the flood- ing commenced (as if to form a narrative sequence). What is fascinating about these paintings is that they are so peaceful. The viewer feels none of the danger or despair of a real flood and is, instead, captivated by the play of light in the sky and water that surround the Restaurant a Saint-Nicolas. The flood seems almost a usual occurrence, as if it were taking place in Venice rather than suburban Paris. Both the calm and the clarity of Sisley's flood landscapes can be con- trasted in every way with paintings of the same subject by French artists of the pre- vious generation. The most famous example, Huet's Flood at Saint - Cloud (1855; Musee de Louvre, Paris), was purchased by Napoleon III for the Musee de Luxembourg and was there- fore widely available for study. Sisley's mundane, but poetic, flood paintings, like those by Pissarro (for example. The Inundation, Saint-Ouen-l' Aumone [1873; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston]) lack the dramatic intensity of their iconographical prototypes in Romantic art. 104 A DAY IN THE COUNTRY No. 24. Alfred Sisley The Seine at Port-Marly, 1 875 THE CRADLE OF IMPRESSIONISM 105 No. 25. Alfred Sisley The Versailles Road, Loitveciennes. IS. 5 106 A DAY IN THE COUNTRY No. 26. Alfred Sisley Flood at Port-Marlv. 1876 THE CRADLE OF IMPRESSIONISM 107 .^^Y The Urban Landscape LA Vie Parisienne, an operetta by Jacques Offenbach, opened to re- sounding popular success at the Palais Royal on the eve of the "Ex- position Universelle" of 1867 (see above, II). Both operetta and exhibition celebrated what was then known as the "new Paris." The libretto of La Vie Parisienne, by Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halevy, was an inspired inventory of the city's charms, extolling in verse her boulevards, parks, cafes, theaters, monuments, and, of course, her river, the Seine. One of the operetta's characters, a former servant, takes advantage of the "Exposi- tion Universelle" to become a guide to Paris. "It is my business," he announces, "to take foreigners 'round the city and show them all the beauties of the capital." 1 In fact, all Paris was "on show" in the second half of the nineteenth century. The series of well-timed industrial exhibitions (fig. 25) was designed to reveal "new Paris" to the world at large. Writers Victor Hugo, Sand, Du Camp, and Michelet, among others, sang the city's praises in the Paris Guide of 1867; Manet, the arch-modernist, devoted a special canvas to that year's exposition (fig. 25). During this period the Impressionists investigated the physiognomy of "new Paris" in a sweeping series of canvases. What was "new Paris?" As we have seen, the ancient capital of France was essentially rebuilt during the 1800s under the direction of Baron Haussmann (see above, II and below, III/3). Its population swelled with a stream of provincial and international immigrants, more than tripling between 1800 and 1870. The near suburbs were annexed to Paris in 1860.- Sanitary services were improved, and a comprehensive urban plan was creat- ed during the Second Empire. Hundreds of thousands of buildings were sys- 109 tematically demolished to make way for the tree-lined boulevards which formed a transportation network resembling the neat allees in classical French gardens (see above, II). The major monuments of Parisian civiliza- tion— the Hotel de Ville, Notre-Dame, the Tour Saint-Jacques, and even the Louvre (no. 84) — were detached from the fabric of the cir\', redesigned and rebuilt to serve as symbolic links between the glories of the French past and her modern destiny. Indeed, Offenbach's La Vie Parisiemie was set in a shift- ing city. Both photographs (see below, V) and popular illustrations of the period reveal the extent of the destruction necessitated by the sweeping trans- formation which led to the creation of "new Paris." In the midst of this supremely transitory cit}', the Impressionists seized upon those aspects that were utterly novel. Their Paris was truly an urban landscape, a mechanical and impersonal world in which the background predominated over the figures. Ignoring the narrow and tortuous streets of the old cit\', the traditional Paris celebrated in prose by Hugo and Balzac and in images by Corot, Honore Daumier, and Charles Meryon, the Impression- ists set their easels in the windows of newly constructed hotels, or apart- ments, and made paintings of railroad stations (nos. 30—32), boulevards (nos. 33, 35), and parks (no. 84). Their city was grand and enormous, less a set of intersecting neighborhoods than a sweeping landscape inhabited by multitudes of people. The changing seasons in this landscape were indicated by the trees which lined the boulevards and filled the parks. The urban landscape of the Impressionists, like their suburban land- scape, had its own peculiar geography. The painters were obsessed with cer- tain areas and ignored others. They painted the streets and boulevards around the Gare Saint-Lazare, combed the banks of the Seine, and moved around the Louvre and its garden, the Tuileries. They climbed the hills of Montmartre and the Trocadero (no. 27) to gaze on the c\t\ as it stretched along the vast plain created by the Seine. Their landscape therefore had rec- ognizable centers, and, for all its scale and grandeur, the Paris they depicted was only a small portion of the actual cit\-. It was confined almost exclusively to the Right Bank and especially to the city's northwest quadrant. While the greatest small parks — the Tuileries and the Pare Monceau — were lovingly painted by Manet, Monet, and Pissarro, the sublime Pare aux Buttes Chaumont, landscaped by Adolphe Alphand and set m a large working-class area, was ignored by the Impressionists. While the Louvre was painted count- less times, Notre-Dame, the Arc de Triomphe, and the Place de la Concorde were avoided. Indeed, as was the case with the Impressionists' renderings of other locales in France, the tourist sites, the places marked prominently in each guidebook, are conspicuous for their absence in the Paris the artists painted (see above, II and III/2). The great river of Paris — its banks and its bridges spanning the heart of the capital — was especially inviting to French nineteenth-century artists, and the Impressionists were no exception. Even minor artists like Stanislas Lepine and Guillaumin executed paintings of the Seine and its surroundings in the 1860s. Berthe Morisot gained admittance to the Salon of 1867 with an 1866 view entitled The Seine under the lena Bridge (Location unknown). One of the first landscapes done by Gauguin was of The Seine at the lena Bridge under Snow (fig. 26); one of the last by Pissarro was The River Seine and the Louvre (fig. 27). In his novel La Curee (1872) Zola opposed the traditional He Saint- Louis neighborhood on the Left Bank (as painted, for example, by Lepine) to 110 A DAY IK THE COUNTRY Haussmann's "new Paris." In his L'Oeuvre (1886) the Seine reappears, luring the painter-hero, Claude Lantier, to its banks again and again. Lantier becomes obsessed with the water and with the city, which he identities with the female principle, an association which recurs often in literature and whose destructive overtones Zola wished to maximize. Yet, if such mysteries of the Seine appealed to many writers, the Impressionists seemed sensitive only to her grandeur, her beaut>', and her charm. Rarely, if ever, does one imagine that the river could symbolize fate, change, or death when looking at paintings by Monet, Pissarro, Renoir, or Sisley. Indeed, it simply exists in such works as a vast visual diversion, a focus of movement, commerce, and exchange (see above, III/2, and below, III/4). Since the experience of living in Pans was thought to be essential to the training of an artist during the nineteenth century, young provincials flocked to the city: Zola and Cezanne from Aix-en-Provence (see below, III/ 9), Bazille from Montpellier, and Monet from Le Havre. The attraction Paris held for artists was due in no small part to the presence of the Louvre — at the very heart of the "new Paris" — and its expanding collections. The museum — actually a palace complex containing a series of museums and government offices — was faithfully frequented by such Paris residents as Manet and I.-H.-J.-T. Fantin-Latour. In 1859 Manet made the acquaintance of Edgar Degas at the Louvre; in 1868 Fantin-Latour introduced Manet to Berthe Morisot there. Yet it was not only the museum's interior and its trea- sures that fascinated these young artists, but the landscape around it. It was from the Louvre itself that Monet did his first urban viev/s in the spring of 1867 {Saint-Germain-l'Auxerrois [Nationalgalerie, Berlin]; The Garden of l' Infante [Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin]; and Quay by Fig. 25. Manet, The "Exposition Unwerselle," Pans, 1867, 1867. Oil on can- vas. 108 X 196.5 cm. Nasjonalgalleriet, Oslo. Photo: Nasjonalgalleriet. THE URBAN LANDSCAPE 111 Fig. 26. Gauguin, The Seine at the lena Bridge under Snow, 1875. Oil on canvas. 65 x 91 cm. Musee d'Orsay, Paris. Photo: Musees Nationau.x. r~ ■ — jiO» the Louvre [Haags Gemeentemuseum, The Hague]). On April 27 he requested permission from the Surintendant des beaux-arts to set up his ea- sel, not as a copyist in the museum, but as a landscape painter in its col- onnade. On May 20 he wrote to Bazille, "Renoir and I are still at work on our views of Paris."^ Once more, in 1872, Renoir and Monet painted the same subject, the Pont-Neuf, adjacent to the Louvre (National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., and Wendy and Emery Reeves Foundation), but this time they chose to paint it in different seasons (see above, 1II/2). Interested in the same vista, Pissarro wrote to his son three years before his death, "I've found a flat on the hill overlooking the Pont-Neuf with a beautiful view. I shall move there in July... I don't want to miss the chance to show another picturesque side of Paris."'' Indeed, the elderly Pissarro made the landscape of the Louvre utterly his own, picturing the building and its surroundings in several series of canvases. The American viewer of these paintings of the Louvre and its land- scape must remember two things. First, the palace complex as we know it was only completed during the Second Empire after a vast program of archi- tectural unification presided over by Ludovico Visconti. It was therefore at once new and old. Second, the portion of the complex called the Palais des Tuileries, built for Marie de Medici and subsequently the urban royal palace until the era of Napoleon III, was sacked and all but totally destroyed during the Commune. Thus, when Pissarro painted this building and its garden in the last decade of his life,-"^ he was portraying an incomplete monument with ambiguous political overtones. Other parts of Paris attracted the Impressionists as well. The "urban village" of Montmartre interested them early on — Pissarro and Cezanne in 112 A DAY IN THE COLINTRY Fig. 27. Pissarro, The River Seme and the Louvre, 1903. Oil on canvas. 45 x 54 cm. Musee d'Orsay, Galerie du Jeu de Paume, Paris. Photo: Musees Nationaux. the 1860s — because of its picturesque, rustic qualities and apparent sepa- rateness from Paris itself. Sisley's View of Montmartre from the Cite des Fleurs (1869; Musee de Peinture et de Sculpture, Grenoble) shows that the area had only just been wrested from the surrounding countryside. Renoir had his studio there, on the rue Cortot, and enjoyed painting in one of the local open-air cafes, the Moulin de la Galette (see his pictures of the same tide [1876; Musee d'Orsay, Galerie du Jeu de Paume, Paris]). Van Gogh setded there in 1886 fresh from Holland and did several canvases of the view he had from his rue Lepic apartment. And it was the panoramic view of the city from the heights of Montmartre that first made the hero of Zola's La Curee, Aristide Rougon-Saccard, aware of the possibilities Paris had to offer. The nearby Batignolles quarter was another neighborhood familiar to the Impressionists, who loved to wile away the hours at the Cafe Guerbois there. In that area they would find Manet (who lived at 34, boulevard des Batignolles from 1864 to 1867 and, later, on the rue de Saint-Petersbourg); there, Cezanne, Pissarro, and Guillaumin met with their critics Edmond Duranty, Philippe Burty, Armand Silvestre, and, of course, Zola. In 1870 Fantin-Latour surrounded Manet with his friends Renoir, Bazille, Monet, Zola, Zacharie Astruc, Edmond Maitre, and Otto Scholderer for the group portrait The Studio in the rue des Batignolles (Musee d'Orsay, Galerie du Jeu de Paume, Paris). And in the same year Bazille gathered the group again to pamt his Atelier (Musee d'Orsay, Galerie du Jeu de Paume, Paris) on the rue de la Condamine. Later the Cafe de la Nouvelle-Athenes (on the Place Pigalle) took over as their meeting place. The Paris of transport and industry was of key importance to the Impressionists. In this they showed, once again, their kinship with THE URBAN LANDSCAPE 113 Offenbach. The first couplet of La Vie Parisienne begins, "We are employees of the Western Line." In the Act One finale the chorus sings, in part: "Brought here by steam we mean to invade the sovereign city, the seat of pleasure."^ The setting is the Gate Saint-Lazare. Like Balzac's hero Eugene de Rastignac in Le Fere Goriot (1831), the citizens of the world outside Paris arrived at its gates with the intention of rooting out all it had to offer.^ Most often they arrived by train. The railway station in the nineteenth century, like the airport in the twentieth, came to epitomize the bustle of modern life (see above, II, and below, III/4). In addition, the appearance of its glass and metal architecture in a city was taken as a sign that that particular urban center had entered the age of industrialization. The industrial side of Paris was depicted by writers (such as Joris-Karl Huysmans in Les Soeurs Vatard [1879] and Zola in La Bete humaine) and painters. The Pont de I'Europe (fig. 28), "one of the most recent achievements of modern Paris,"** proved an inspiration first to Gustave Caillebotte, then to Monet (nos. 29-30). The 1867 Paris Guide directed the tourist's attention to the bridge's curious metal skeleton, "so astonishing in its bizarre form and immense proportions."' Inspired by such sights, in 1879 Manet proposed the following totally modern project to the Prefer de la Seine for the decoration of the new Hotel de Ville: ...a series of compositions representing — to use an expression by now well estab- lished and one that serves well to illustrate what I have in mind — the guts of Paris with its various professions, each in its proper milieu, the public and commercial life of our times. I shall include Paris-Halles, Paris-Railways, Paris-Port, Paris- Underground, Paris-Races and Gardens."' The then-Prefet's predecessor, the famous Baron Haussmann, had attached great importance to the construction of railway stations, as is clear in his memoirs. The arteries he created within Paris were meant to continue or extend the rail routes outside their rectilinear pattern, thus serving as a model for his plan to speed traffic within the city as well as into and out of it (see above, II, and below III/4). The Parnassan poet Theophile Gautier saw train stations as "palaces of modern industry exhibiting the religion of the age: the railways. These cathedrals of the new mankind are the points where nations meet, the center where all converges, the nucleus of gigantic iron-rayed stars that stretch to the ends of the earth."" The district of Paris presided over by the Gate Saint-Lazare and known as the Quartier de I'Europe (fig. 29) was the home of Manet (4, rue de Saint-Petersbourg, later changed to rue de Lenmgrad); his friend Stephane Mallarme, who held his "literary afternoons" there (29, rue de Moscou, then 87, rue de Rome); Caillebotte (77, rue de Miromesnil); and Monet (17, rue Moncey, then 26, rue d'Edimbourg). Since his youth Manet had been familiar with the area surrounding the Gate Saint-Lazare, from which trains left for Normandy and Argenteuil. In 1871 he gave Pissarro the following address for his Paris studio: "8 rue d'Isly, near the Gate Saint-Lazare." '- Following Manet and Caillebotte, who painted the region of the Care Saint-Lazare in the early and mid-1 870s, Monet decided to try his hand at painting the station in 1877 and 1878 (nos. 30-32). Instead of observing the trains from the Pont de I'Europe like Manet or Caillebotte, Monet went down to the level of the tracks. While his colleagues gave predominance to the human figure, Monet concentrated on the trains. Manet and Caillebotte merely implied their presence by rendering smoke rising from the station below; Monet, more audacious in his representation of modern life, had no 114 A DAY IN THE COUNTRY w^\ Fig. 28. Caillebotte, The Pont de I'Europe, 1 876. Oil on canvas. 131x181 cm. Musee du Petit-Palais, Geneva. qualms about showing the locomotives themselves. His interest was shared by others. The authors of an 1888 study devoted to the railways, entitled simply Chetnins de fer and, incidentally, a gold mine of source material for Zola when he set to work on his novel La Bete hitmame, had the following to say about the aesthetics of the machinery involved: The artistic side of locomotive construction has attracted many partisans here, and there is no denying that it is absolutely rational: it is the experience of reality. Industrial objects have their own special beauty about them, and we have reached the point where we call a locomotive beautiful or ugly.'^ In fact, ever since Turner's Rain, Steam, Speed (1844; The National Gallery, London), the train motif had earned a certain favor with both painters and naturalist writers. Thomas Couture recommended it as a "noble" subject, and Champfleury, in an analysis of Courbet dating from 1861, wrote: Murals done for railway stations have resulted in some. ..curious pictures. An en- gine pulling out, a train pulling in, passengers alighting on the platform, a new line being blessed by the Church, a cornucopia overflowing with the produce intro- duced to Europe by the wonders of steam locomotion — all these were to provide a cycle of diversified motifs. What could be more fantastic than a large machine, its fire-breathing belly and large red eyes flying like the wind through the countryside at night, driven by gnome-like creatures all black with coal and coke? Is not the engine and the role it plays in the countryside sufficient material for a fine picture. ..[Courbet] has yet to paint the iron mastodon running along the rails through trees and rocks, past tiny hillside towns, across a bridge and over a vil- lage— intrepid, snorting, hissing, sweating — and the coming and going of the crowds — full of life, tumultuous, gaping, weeping, embracing. '"' According to the memoirs of Jean Renoir, the son of the painter, Mo- net procured permission from the director of the Chemins de fer de I'Ouest to paint the interior of the Gate Saint-Lazare.''' He began work in January 1877. Even if the proximity of his rue Moncey studio to the station expedited matters somewhat, he still had to paint rapidly to complete the seven views of THE URBAN LANDSCAPE 115 l^-^^^^r^^ ^^^^^ Fig. 29. Pans — The Rebuilding of the Gare Saint-Lazare — The Old Station (1. View from the Pont de I'Europe. — 2. Main station entrance. — 3. Entrance to the main lines, rue d' Amsterdam. — 4. The exit yard and the wooden bridge of the rue de Rome. — 5. The Cour Bony.), 1885. Photo: La Vie du Rail, Paris. the Gare Saint-Lazare (three of which are brought together here [nos. SC- SI]) in time for the third Impressionist exhibition that April. There, they earned Zola's high praise: M. Claude Monet is the most marked personalit)- of the group. This year he is exhibiting some superb station interiors. One can hear the rumble of the trains surging forward, see the torrents of smoke winding through vast engine sheds. This is the painting of today: modern settings beautiful in their scope. Our artists must find the poetry of railway stations as our fathers found the poetry of forests and rivers.'* While living alongside the railway line in Medan, Zola himself became an habitue of the Gare Saint-Lazare and conceived the idea for a novel with a railway setting: ...a novel, my most original yet, which will take place along a railway network. There will be a large station where ten lines cross, each line with its own story and all of them coming together at the main station; the novel will be imbued with the flavor of the place, and life's furious pace will resound through it like a musical accompaniment. '~ The novel in question was, of course. La Bete humaine, part of the author's Rougon-Macquart series. Several passages are clearly dependent on Monet's canvases; for example, "The Pont de I'Europe signal box announced. ..the Havre express as it emerged from Batignolles tunnel. ...The train entered the station with a brief whistle, grating on its brakes, breathing smoke.... "'^ Later Zola stressed the beaut\- of the locomotive called "La Lison": It was one of the express engines, the kind with two coupled axles, and it was elegant on both a grand and small scale, with its large, light wheels joined by arms of steel, its broad chest, its long and mighty loins, with all the logic and certaint)' that go into the sovereign beaut)" of metal beings, with precision in strength.'"" With its train stations, neighborhoods, and bridges, the Paris of the Impressionists was chiefly remarkable as an out-of-door c\t\\ a cit)- of light, atmosphere, and space. Its life was what the French writer Jean Schopfer called "life in the open air,"-° a truly pubUc and urban life. If the real cit>' of Paris was filled with social tensions, class conflict, and urban alienation played out in small apartments and garrets and obsessively recorded by contemporary Realist writers, its inhabitants could escape from such pres- sures into the boulevards, parks, and quays of the "new Paris." The very gran- deur and healthiness of this new city — that pictured by Monet, Pissarro, and the rest — is set into relief when compared to the patterned apartments of Pierre Bonnard and Edouard Vuillard and the claustrophobic brothels and dance halls of Theophile Steinlen and Henri Toulouse-Lautrec. In Impres- sionist Paris passersby, carriages, carts, and omnibuses seem trapped tem- porarily on canvas, caught perpetually between destinations. This Paris, the capital of the world's affairs, extended into the countryside; the promenaders of its parks and boulevards are the same transitory figures who walk through the Impressionists' poppy fields outside Paris (see below, III/7) or gather along the Seine to watch the boat races at Argenteuil (nos. 39-46). These personages are the same quintessentially up-to-date, uniformed figures — with each hat and walking stick carefully observed and recorded — who crowded the docks in Rouen or maneuvered the quays in Le Havre. Their very smallness — indeed, their insignificance in the context of the Impression- ist vision — gives them a modern, and utterly urban, universalit>'. — S. G.-R 116 A D.W IN THE COUNTRY Notes 1. See Offenbach, 1869. 2. Pinknev, 1958, p. 151. 3. Wildenstein, 1974-79, vol. 1, p. 423; see also Isaacson, 1966. 4. Pissarro, 1950, p. 474. 5. Pissarro and Venturi 1 123-1 136. 6. See Offenbach, 1869. 7. Schivelbusch, 1979, pp. 161-169; see also Centre National d'Art et de Culture Georges Pompidou, 1978, p. 62. 8. Berhaut, 1978, p. 29. 9. Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 1976, p. 106, n. 5; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 1982, pp. 53 ff. 10. Reunion des Musees Nationaux, 1983, p. 516. 1 1. Centre National d'Art et de Culture Georges Pompidou, 1978, p. 8. 12. Wildenstein, 1974-79, vol. I, p. 428. 13. Walter, 1979, pp. 51-53. 14. Champfleury, 1973, p. 185. 15. Renoir, 1962, pp. 168-169; reprinted in part in Evers, 1972, pp. 20-21. 16. Zola, 1970, p. 282. 17. Zola, 1960-68, vol. IV, p. 1710; Walter, 1979, p. 51. 18. Zola, 1960-68, vol. IV, p. 1 105; Walter, 1979, p. 51. 19. Zola, 1960-68, vol. IV, pp. 1127-1128; Walter, 1979, p. 51. 20. Schopfer, 1903, p. 157 ff. THE URBAN LANDSCAPE 117 27. Berthe Morisot View of Paris from the Trocadero (VuE DE Paris des hauteurs du Trocadero), 1872 Berthe Morisot, as we have seen, exhib- ited her first Parisian cityscape (The Seine under the Una Bridge [1866; Loca- tion unknown]) at the 1867 Salon.' This work has sometimes been confused with the now-quite-famous View of Paris from the Trocadero, which by common agreement dates from 1872.- This sil- very, diaphanous view of the city shows the artist to have been under the influ- ence of Corot, with whom she had in fact studied during the 1860s. Morisot's own personality found expression nonethe- less in her particular affinity for light, an affinity which grew throughout her career.^ To create this composition, Morisot set up her easel at the top of the Chaillot hill, where the rue Franklin runs into the Place du Trocadero. The Palais du Trocadero (1878) had not yet been built, nor, of course, had the Eiffel Tower, and the artist therefore had an unobstructed view of the old Trocadero gardens and the far side of the Seine spanned by the Pont d'lena and, further east, the Pont de I'Alma at the Champ-de-Mars. Outlined in the distance, from left to right, are the two towers of Sainte-Clotilde, those of Notre-Dame in the background, those of Saint-Sulpice to the left of Les Invalides, and, to its right, a blur representing the cupola of the Pantheon. The figures in the foreground have been identified as the artist's two sisters, Edma Pontillon and Yves Gobillard, the latter accom- panied by her daughter Paule.'' The site was a natural one for Morisot to choose: her family lived nearby, on the rue des Moulins (now rue Scheffer) on the corner of the rues Frank- lin and Vineuse, and her father had a stu- dio built in the garden for his daughters. In a watercolor sketch (The Art Institute of Chicago) for a painting of the same year. Woman and Child on a Balcony (Henry Itdeson Collection, New York), Morisot showed Edma Pontillon and Paule on the balcony of the family house overlooking a view quite similar to the one shown here. The few differences are due to a slight shift in vantage point to the southwest.^ Morisot also may have chosen to observe Paris from the end of the rue Franklin because Manet had painted a canvas depicting the "Exposition Universelle" of 1867 (fig. 25) from a spot several feet lower (see above, III/3). (Morisot had married Eugene Manet, the painter's brother, in December 1874). Further, guides recommended the spot to sightseers for the panorama it of- fered both in conjunction with the "Ex- position Universelle" and independently of it. This painting was acquired in 1876 by Dr. Georges de Bellio, one of the Impressionists' early supporters, and subsequently became part of the Jacques Doucet Collection (see below, IV).* The fact that Morisot is buried in the nearby Cimetiere de Passy in the tomb of Edouard Manet lends the picture an especially moving character. Notes 1. Bataille and Wildenstein 11. 2. Jamot, 1927, pp. 3-4; Mainardi, 1980, pp. 110; 115, nos. 31-33. 3. Fourreau, 1925, p. 280. 4. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 1982, no. 3. 5. Ibid. 6. Niculescu, 1964, pp. 213, 234; 235, no. 970. 28. Claude Monet MONTORGUEIL StREET, CELEBRATION OF 30 June i878 {La rue Montorgueil, Fete du 30juin 1878J, 1878 Having left Argenteuil in the early months of 1878, Monet spent some time in Paris near the Place de I'Europe at 26, rue d'Edimbourg. The city, decked with flags for the national holiday of June 30, inspired Monet to paint two canvases: this one cind Rue Saint-Denis {Musee des Beaux-Arts et de la Ceramique, Rouen). The titles of these works, both of which were shown at the fourth Impressionist exhibition in 1879, are occasionally re- versed and the painting in Rouen mistak- enly entitled /zJy 14 in Paris. ^ The great street celebrations for the national holiday of June 30, 1878, were 118 A DAY IN THE COUNTRY No. 27. Berthe Morisot View OF Pares from the Trocadero, 1872 THE URBAN LANDSCAPE 119 No. 28. Claude Monet MoNTORGUEiL Street, Celebration of 30 June 1878, 18 120 A DAY IN THE COUNTRY No. 29. Gustave Caillebotte On the Europe Bridge, 1876-77 THE URBAN LANDSCAPE 121 the first such festivities held in Paris since the Commune. In 1871 the national gov- ernment had banned any form of collective assemblage in the streets to guard against riots and anti-government demonstrations. The 1878 holiday was therefore of special importance, and preparations for it were lavish. The riot of republican flags especially fascinated Monet, whose political sympathies nor- mally were not expressed overtly in his pictures. In this case, however, the paint- ing is as much a celebration of the repub- lic as of the festivities themselves. Both it and Rue Saint-Denis were painted as seen from above. According to Daniel Wildenstein,- Monet observed the scene which inspired Rue Saint-Denis from the balcony of what is now 141, rue Saint- Denis (where it crosses the rue de Turbigo) looking north; he observed Montorgueil Street, Celebration of 30 June 1878, the perspective of which is considerably intensified by intersecting diagonals, from that street's intersection with the rues Mandar and Greneta, like- wise looking north. In this painting, executed several years after The Boulevard des Capucines (1874; Pushkin Museum, Moscow), Monet again transferred the animation of the capital's streets to canvas. To sug- gest the crowd, he used a large number of dark and rapid strokes (no. 32). The motif of the flags in the sun recurs several times in his work (no. 5). The same holiday in the same year prompted Manet to paint his two canvases entitled The Rue Mosnier Decked with Flags (Paul Mellon Collec- tion, Upperville, and Biihrle Collection, Zurich). Unlike Monet, who went to Les Halles to show the working people cele- brating, Manet remained in his studio at 4, rue Saint-Petersbourg (later, rue de Leningrad), which gave him a good view of the rue Mosnier (now the rue de Berne).' Notes I.July 14 did not become France's national holi- day until 1880 (National Gallery of Art, Wash- ington, D.C., 1982, p. 246; Niculescu 1964, pp. 245, n. 42; 258, 264). 2. Wildenstein 470. 3. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 1982, no. 90. 29. Gustave Caillebotte On the Europe Bridge (Le Pont de l'Eurofe), 1876-77 After Manet — whose Railroad (Na- tional Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.), done in the Quartier de I'Europe in 1872-73, was accepted by the Salon of 1874 — and the year before Monet (no. 30), Caillebotte demonstrated his interest in this modern Parisian land- mark by painting The Pont de I'Europe (Petit-Palais, Musee d'Art Moderne, Ge- neva) in 1876, of which the picture illus- trated here is a variant. The Place de I'Europe stood at the center of the district of the same name in which the streets are named after major European capitals. The Place consisted primarily of the roadway of a large iron bridge (built between 1865 and 1868 and completely rebuilt in 1930') which overlooks the tracks of the Gate Saint- Lazare, giving passersby an unusual view of the station's activities. In the spring of 1877, at the third Impressionist exhibition, Caillebotte showed The Pont de I'Europe together with other paintings, while Monet dispayed his seven Gare Saint-Lazare canvases. Caillebotte immediately acquired three of these (including one [no. 31] later accepted by the French government [Musee d'Orsay, Galerie du Jeu de Paume, Paris]), thereby dem- onstrating his interest in the subject mat- ter and his insight into the value of his Impressionist friend's work.- Although so grand a work as The Pont de I'Europe called for numerous preparatory studies,"* this variant, done several months later, was preceded by only a single oil sketch (Richard M. Co- hen Collection, Los Angeles).** Marie Berhaut has stressed the originality of this version, pointing out that ...the composition is totally different from the earlier canvas, the framing of the sub- ject more unusual. The spot depicted here is part of the Place de TEurope itself, the very center of the bridge, its highest point. Hence the flattened, surbased effect creat- ed by the tops of the iron crosspieces with respect to the figures. To the right we see the large glass arrival hall, which appears in several of Monet's Gare Saint-Lazare series...." More than the canvas exhibited in 1877, this version highlights the bridge's metallic structures; their geometry demands to be noticed. They are arranged according to a plan which par- allels that of the painted surface, and by shutting out the sky they reduce any sense of depth, thus creating the rising perspective sought by the artist. The fig- ures have been relegated to the extreme left of the composition to leave the framework of the bridge relatively unobstructed. The severity and indus- trial, resolutely modern character of the subject are thereby greatly enhanced. At the time of the Impressionist exhibition of 1877 Zola made a point of praising the talent of "M. Caillebotte, a young painter who shows the greatest of cour- age and does not shrink from tackling modern subjects life-size."*' As in Traffic Island on Boulevard Haussmann (no. 33), we find the elegant silhouette of the artist himself in top hat, his light scarf and white gloves standing out against the background. In both pic- tures the figures are arbitrarily broken off at the edge of the canvas, a device that ...results from a desire to paint reality, ex- press an instant of contemporary life, a desire that has led the Impressionists to seek out uncommon points of view." The painting also exemplifies the in- fluence of the compositions of Japanese prints (where bridges appear frequently) and of photography on the painters of the time (see below, V). The fact that Caillebotte repeated the Pont de I'Europe motif and even had a glassed-in "omnibus" made to enable him to observe the bridge in all kinds of weather suggests that his interests par- alleled those manifested in the famous series of his friend Monet (see below, III/7). Notes 1. Varnedoe, 1974, pp. 28-29, 41, 58-59. 2. Berhaut, 1978, p. 18. 3. Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 1976, nos. 16- 23. 4. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 1982, no. 13. 5. Berhaut 46. 6. Zola, 1970, p. 283. 7. Berhaut, 1978, p. 34. 121 A DAY IN THE COUNTRY No. 30. Claude Monet The Europe Bridge at Saist-Lazare Train Station, 1877 THE URBAN LANDSCAPE 123 No. 31. Claude Monet Saint-Lazare Train Station, 1877 (detail on p. lOS) 124 A DAY IN THE COUNTRY dv♦>C'J^^^^^ 1 T .,:a. ^ ^i»^ — f--l» -,, ^, ■ No. 32. Claude Monet Saint-Lazare Train Station, the Normandy Train, 1877 THE URBAN LANDSCAPE 125 30. Claude Monet The Europe Bridge at Saint-Lazare Train Station (Le Pont de l'Europe, Gare Saint- Lazare), 1877 In creating this composition Monet posi- tioned himself just outside the Gare Saint-Lazare, where the tracks are spanned by the Pont de l'Europe. The metal railing of the bridge, concealed in part by the smoke of the trains, can be seen on the right. Monet stood facing the backs of the buildings along the rue de Rome. The glass roof of the station, not visible in the painting, began several feet to his left. Dr. de Bellio (no. 27) acquired this work in March 1877 and immediately lent it to the third Impressionist exhibi- tion, which opened the following month (it was exhibited as no. 98, Le Pont de Rome, Gare Saint-Lazare). The place re- presented here is that described by Zola just over ten years later in La Bete humaine: [Severine] turned and walked down the rue d'Edimbourg as far as the Pont de ['Europe. ...Unsure of where to go or what to do and quite distraught, she leaned mo- tionless against one of the railings, looking down through the iron framework upon the vast expanse of the station, where trains were in constant motion. She fol- lowed them with anxious eyes. ...Then, in a paroxysm of despair, she felt a tormenting desire. ..to fling herself under a train. One was just emerging from the canopy of the main lines. She watched it advance and pass beneath her, puffing a tepid swirl of white steam in her face.' Note I.Zola, 1960- 68, vol. IV, pp. 1108-1109. 31. Claude Monet Saint-Lazare Train Station (La Gare Saint-Lazare), 1877 To paint this canvas, as Daniel Wildenstein has pointed out,' Monet stood inside the part of the Gare Saint- Lazare reserved for the suburban lines. The glass canopy roof creates a symmet- rical composition centered on the loco- motive in motion. A skillful rendering of the effects of sunlight enabled the artist to play with variations of light on the profuse smoke clouds and background buildings. The apparent dissolution of the stone surface under the sunlight anticipates his investigations in the Rouen Cathedral series some 20 years later. This work, part of Caillebotte's collection (no. 29), was shown at the third Impressionist exhibition in 1877, where the critic Georges Riviere had the following to say about it: This picture represents a train pulling in. ...The sun, passing through the panes of glass, highlights the engines and the sand along the tracks in gold.- In preparation for this composition Monet did a drawing in a sketch pad (Musee Marmottan, Paris) which con- tains a number of sketches relevant to the Gare Saint-Lazare series. Notes 1. Wildenstein 438. 2. Ibid. 32. Claude Monet Saint-Lazare Train Station, the Normandy Train (La Gare Saint-Lazare, le train de Normandie), 1877 Still inside the Gare Saint-Lazare, though this time in the east, or main-line, section of the building, Monet concentrated in this painting on the train from Nor- mandy. He demonstrated his sense of space and skill at conveying various at- mospheric effects. As Rodolphe Walter has noted, "Whereas in the other canvas [Saint-Lazare Train Station (no. 31)] the gas lamps hung from the iron frame- work, in this one they stand along the platform as they do along citv' streets."' The glass lets in a diffuse light, and the smoke from the engines intrudes some- what on the perspective. And, as in The Boulevard des Capucines (1874; Pushkin Museum, Moscow), the figures have been reduced to small, simple silhouettes evoked by a few dark strokes (no. 28); their profusion creates the bustle asso- ciated with railway stations. Ernest Hoschede, the collector who was at this time the husband of Monet's second wife, Alice (see below, III/8), acquired this canvas in March 1877 and lent it to the third Impressionist exhibi- tion the next month, in which it was exhibited as no. 97, Arrivee du train de Normandie, gare Saint-Lazare. Monet's sketch pad in the Musee Marmottan (no. 31) contains a study which is related to this painting. Note I.Walter, 1979, p. 53. 33. Gustave Caillebotte Traffic Island on Boulevard Haussmann fL/N Refuge boulevard Haussmann), 1880 After his mother's death in 1878, Caillebotte moved with his brothers into a suite of apartments behind the Opera at 31, boulevard Haussmann on the cor- ner of the rue Gluck.' These apartments occupied an upper story with balconies, thus enabling Caillebotte to repeat Monet's Boulevard des Capucines (1874; Pushkin Museum, Moscow) experiment. Caillebotte was particularly con- cerned to explore the use of rising perspective, which Pissarro employed later to such advantage in The Place du Theatre Franqais, Paris (no. 36). In this view from above, from the very end of the building where Caillebotte lived, we are shown a traffic island at the intersec- tion of the boulevard with the rues Gluck and Scribe. The space is flat; the sky does not appear at all. The choice of such an odd perspective reflects the influence of Japanese prints- and contemporary pho- tography^ (see below, V). As in many of Caillebotte's paint- ings (no. 29), a figure is cut off at the edge of the canvas. J. Kirk T. Varnedoe has called attention to the three men in 126 A DAY IN THE COUNTRY .^^ k ^wiftttrtl. J No. 33. Gusiave Caillebotte Traffic Island on Boulevard Haussmann, 1880 THE URBAN LANDSCAPE 127 top hats, whose dark, isolated silhou- ettes contrast clearly with the light space around them. By rendering the shadows which they and a few street lamps cast on the ground, Caillebotte indicated the direction his light was coming from. Because the men are all dressed alike, Varnedoe has hypothesized that they are in fact a single walking man captured during three separate phases of a move- ment. He has pointed out that the artist used the same device in The Floor- Planers (1875; Musee d'Orsay, Galerie du Jeu de Paume, Paris) and has inter- preted the recurring spectator figure in Caillebotte's work as a symbolic self- portrait."* Degas must have known this canvas since in 1880 he wrote to Pissarro, "Caillebotte is doing traffic islands along the boulevard Haussmann from his win- dows."^ The painting figured in the "Ex- position retrospective d'oeuvres de G. Caillebotte" organized in June 1894, several months after the painter's death, by his brother Martial. Notes 1. Varnedoe, 1976, pp. 37; 147, fig. 1; no. 53. 2. Berhaut, 1978, p. 44. 3. Ibid., pp. 46, 48, n. 17; Scharf, 1968, p. 133; figs. 115-116. 4. Varnedoe, 1976, p. 54. 5. Berhaut 141. 34. Camille Pissarro The Place du Havre, Paris (Place du Havre, Paris), 1893 In February 1893 Pissarro moved tem- porarily into the Hotel Garnier, 111, rue Saint-Lazare, in a part of Pans he had come to know well: the trains from Eragny (where he had bought a house the year before) came into the Gate Saint-Lazare, so it was always the point of departure for his explorations of the capital. Working from the window of his hotel room (a practice he later repeated in Rouen and other parts of Paris), Pissarro painted a series of four works, which — if we exclude The Boulevard Rochechouart (1878) and the unusual snow effect in The Peripheral Boulevards (1879; both Musee Marmottan, Paris) — comprise his first pictorial impressions of the capital. All four canvases — of which The Place du Havre, Paris is one- were painted from a high vantage point, in the manner of Monet's Boulevard des Capucines (1874; Pushkin Museum, Moscow). The Place du Havre, Paris gives a fine view of the site, its sunny fa- cades and roadway jammed with vehi- cles and pedestrians. It was first shown to the Parisian public in March 1893 at an exhibit Durand-Ruel devoted to the artist's recent works (see below, IV). Already a master of urban scenes, Pissarro proved highly sensitive to the special light and atmosphere of Paris. In 1897 he returned to the rue Saint-Lazare and the Place du Havre, doing litho- graphs of both subjects' in the rain before turning his attention to the bou- levard Montmartre (no. 35). Note 1. Reunion des Musees Nationaux, 1981, nos. 196-197. 35. Camille Pissarro Boulevard Montmartre, Mardi Gras (Boulevard Montmartre, Mardi Gras), 1897 On February 8, 1897, after his stay at the Hotel Garnier (no. 34) the month before, Pissarro wrote to his son: I'm leaving again on the tenth of the month, going back to Paris, this time to do a series of the boulevard des Italians.... Durand-Ruel finds the boulevard series a good idea, and he's looking forward to overcoming the difficulties involved. I've decided on a spacious room at the Grand Hotel de Russie, 1, rue Drouot, which gives me a view of the entire network of bou- levards almost as far as the Porte Saint- Denis or in any case as far as the boulevard Bonne-Nouvelle. ' Ralph T. Coe has published a photo- graph of the Grand Hotel de Russie taken before it was destroyed in 1927 so that the boulevard Haussmann could be widened.- By February 13 Pissarro was at work: Here I am, settled in and covering my large canvases. I'm going to try to have one or two ready to do the Mardi Gras crowd. I can't tell yet what the results will be like; I'm very much afraid the streamers will give me trouble.' A month later, however, he could write to his son, I've got a number of irons in the fire. Dur- ing Mardi Gras I did the boulevards with the crowd and the march of the Boeuf Gras, with the sun playing on the streamers and the trees, and the crowd in the shade...."" Pissarro depicted the boulevards in some 15 paintings. Of the three devoted to the Carnival procession, the one illus- trated here is perhaps the most effective.^ The scene is bathed in the soft, golden light characteristic of the artist's late period, and the multiplicity of small strokes to suggest the density of the crowd might as easily be considered a reference to Monet's Boulevard des Capucines (1874; Pushkin Museum, Moscow) as attributed to Pissarro's own Pointillist experiments of the 1880s. Suf- fering from an eye ailment, Pissarro was forced to give up plein-air painting. To observe the activity going on along the grand boulevards, he adopted Monet's raised hotel window vantage point. In 1899 Pissarro did a lithograph, most likely from memory, after Bou- levard Montmartre, Mardi Gras.'' Notes 1. Pissarro, 1950, p. 431. 2. Coe, 1954, p. 93, fig. 1. 3. Pissarro, 1950, p. 431. 4. Ibid., p. 433. 5. National Gallery of Art, 1982, no. 97. 6. Reunion des Musees Nationaux, 1981, nos. 78, 199. 128 A DAY IN THE COUNTRY .^^^sV-'l ■■#'^i>:«fe:"'''^'*v^ .^''y':'' w ':■?■■' ^M&j,|^...-vr-- t I No. 34. Camille Pissarro The Place du Havre, Paris, 1893 THE URBAN LANDSCAPE 119 36. Camille Pissarro The Place du Theatre Fran^ais, Paris (La Place du Theatre pRANgAis, Paris) 1898 On December 15, 1897, Pissarro informed his son Lucien that he had discovered a new Parisian motif: I almost forgot to tell you: I've found a room at the Grand Hotel du Louvre with a superb view of the avenue de I'Opera and the corner of the Place du Palais-Royal! It makes a beautiful subject! It may not be very aesthetic, but I'm delighted at the chance to see what I can do with these Parisian streets, which people usually call ugly but which are so silvery, so luminous, so alive. They are altogether different from the boulevards. Totally modern!' Six days later he added a few details: I hope to be back by about January 5 and take up residence at the Grand Hotel du Louvre, where I shall start work for the [June 1898] exhibition [at Durand-Ruel'sj. The expense will be considerable, but Durand-Ruel seems encouraging. I'm in the mood to work, and after a good look at the subject matter I feel on top of things. - On January 6, having given his son the address of the hotel (172, rue de Rivoli),^ Pissarro described his suite there: I've been settled in since yesterday. I have two large rooms and some good large win- dows that give me a view of the avenue de I'Opera. The motif is very beautiful, very painterly. I've already begun work on two canvases."* In a letter dated January 23 Pissarro spoke again of how smoothly his work was going: "I'm doing the avenue de I'Opera and a bit of the Place du Theatre Fran^ais. The motif is superb, and things are moving along quite well."^ Pissarro stayed in Paris until late April. From the windows of the Hotel du Louvre he did approximately 15 paint- ings showing the rue Saint-Honore, the avenue de I'Opera, and the Place du The- atre Fran^ais — of which this is one — from different perspectives. Most of them were shown at the "Exposition d'oeuvres recentes de Camille Pissarro" organized by Durand-Ruel in June 1898. It is this exhibition the artist alluded to in another letter to his son: My Avenues de I'Opera are on display at Durand-Ruel's. I have a large room all to myself. There are twelve Avenues, seven or eight Avenues and Boulevards, and some studies of Eragny I'm quite satisfied with ....It [the room] has a nice look about it. The rooms nearby have a series of fine Renoirs, superb Monets,...some Puvis de Chavannes....My Avenues are so bright they would go very well with the Puvis. ^ Pissarro was right to stress the dif- ferences between his paintings of ave- nues and those of boulevards.-' The long sweep of the boulevard Montmartre in Boulevard Montmartre, Mardi-Gras (no. 35) contrasts sharply with the wide- open space of the Place du Theatre Fran- ^ais, depicted here where it becomes the avenue de I'Opera (the beginnings of which are almost invisible); in fact, this composition is closed off completely at the right by the theater facade. The total absence of sky and horizon and a per- spective which makes the background seem to rise before our eyes have sug- gested parallels — as with other works already discussed — with the composi- tions of Japanese prints.'* Several schol- ars (John Rewald, Leopold Reidemeister, Charles Kunstler) also have compared the works of Pissarro painted from the windows of the Hotel du Louvre to contemporary photographs'* (see below, V). Notes 1. Pissarro, 1950, pp. 441-442. 2. Ibid., p. 443. 3. Ibid., p. 444. 4. Ibid. 5. Ibid., p. 447. 6. Ibid., p. 454. 7. Coe, 1954, p. 109. 8. Reunion des Musees Nationaux, 1981, nos. 79- 80. 9. Pissarro, 1950, figs. 53-54; Reidemeister, 1963, p. 169; Kunstler, 1974, p. 65. 130 A DAY IN THE COUNTRY No. 35. Camille Pissarro Boulevard Montmartre. Mardi Gras, 1897 THE URBAN LANDSCAPE 131 37—38. Camille Pissarro Bridge AT Rouen, (Le Grand Pont, Rouen), 1896 Rouen Harbor, Saint-Sever (Port DE Rouen, Saint-Sever), 1896 Pissarro first worked at Rouen during the autumn of 1883. He returned for two long stays thirteen years later. From Jan- uary to March 1896 he lived at the Hotel de Paris (51, quai de Paris) on the Seine. "I've been to see the Hotel d'Angleterre," he wrote to his son on January 23. It has a fine location, on the embankment, but it's very expensive: eight francs for a room on the fourth floor. I may not be so well off here, but I pay only five francs for a nice room on the second floor and another on the third, above the mezzanine. The view is beautiful.' The Hotel d'Angleterre is where Monet had stayed while painting his Cathedral series between 1892 and 1893. When Pissarro returned to Rouen for two months in the autumn of 1896, he began his first letter to his son as follows: Rouen, September 8, 1896. Hotel d'Angleterre, Cours Boeldieu....I am in Rouen. From my hotel window I've a view of the port at an angle different from the one offered by the Hotel du Pans. I'm in the process of familiarizing myself with the way the scenery looks from here.- Pissarro's idea of painting the Pont Boeldieu, or Grand Pont, dated as far back as the preceding February, when he had written to his son. What particularly interests me is the motif of the iron bridge in wet weather with all the vehicles, pedestrians, workers on the embankments, boats, smoke, haze in the distance; it's so spirited, so alive. I've tried ro catch the hive of activity that is Rouen of the embankments.- (The work Pissarro had in mind at that point hangs today in the Art Gallery of Toronto.'^) The Bridge at Rouen shows the other side of the bridge as it appeared to the painter from the Hotel d'Angle- terre: I have a motif to do. ..from my window: the new Saint-Sever district directly oppo- site, with the hideous Gare d'Orleans, all shiny and new, and any number of chim- neys, large and small, spouting plumes of smoke. In the foreground, boats and water; to the left of the station, the working class district that runs along the embankment to the iron bridge, the Pont Boieldieu; a hazy morning sun It's beautiful, Venice- like,...extraordinary.. ..It's art, art filtered through my own perceptions. And that's not the only subject; there are wonders left and right. ...^ The glass roof next to the high chimney visible in this pamting belongs to the Gare d'Orleans. Rouen Harbor, Saint-Sever repre- sents yet another attempt on Pissarro's part to reconstruct the lively atmosphere of the port of Rouen as he saw it from his window. In the foreground he has shown several cranes unloading boats; ne.xt, some small craft on the Seine; and finally, on the left bank, the factories and warehouses of Saint-Sever. Notes 1. Pissarro, 1950, p. 397. 2. Ibid., p. 416. 3. Ibid., pp. 400-401. 4. Reunion des Musees Nationaux, 1981, nos. 75- 5. Pissarro, 1950, p. 419. 132 A DAY IN THE COLINTRY .u^^Hf^^yu No. 36. Camille Pissarro The Place du Theatre Frani;:ais, Paris. 1898 THE URBAN LANDSCAPE 133 No. 37. Camille Pissarro Bridge AT Rouen, 1896 134 A DAY IN THE COUNTRY C T, i-'^^-x^. ^s^VK No. 38. Camille Pissarro Rouen Harbor, Saint-Sever, 1896 THE URBAN LANDSCAPE 135 >'-^^i?m Rivers, Roads, and Trains THE WEB OF ROADS, RAILROADS, AND RIVERS that ran throughout France during the nineteenth century was without doubt the most formidable system of transport and communication in the world. Partially nationalized and partially private, this system was or- ganized into primary, secondary, and tertiary networks. The first was a nationwide system of communication between Paris and the major commer- cial and administrative cities of France; it had been operative since the 1600s as a series of national roads to which canals and railroads gradually had been added. The secondary system insured communication between provincial centers and the towns and major villages in the territories they governed; this was almost exclusively a network of roads, and less of it was nationalized than of the primary system. The tertiary system was the oldest and the least well maintained, consisting of small roads and — for the most part — paths linking small towns and villages to each other and to the countryside around them. Few of these paths were maintained by any governmental authority, and most were intended for use by animals or as access to agricultural areas. The Impressionists painted all aspects of this system of transport and communication, from the rivers and canals to the national highways and lo- cal roads and, finally, to the tiny paths up hills and into the fields. The proto- types for this interest in representing human movement through the land- scape are numerous. Most assiduous in their pictorial analysis of transit were the Dutch painters of the seventeenth century (no. 50). It is probably no acci- dent that the paintings of the Ruisdaels, Meindert Hobbema, and others — like those of the Impressionists — record a system of roads and canals which had, in part, only recendy been begun. Unlike seventeenth- and eighteenth- century French and Italian landscape painters, however, who used roads and rivers as compositional devices to move the viewer's eye slowly back through 137 Map 6. Argenteuil, Neuilly, and Environs, feol^ '^ the picture plane and into the distance, Dutch artists were preoccupied with such motifs as motifs. Rarely in French painting before the Impressionists had this been the case. Thus the relationship between their compositions and those of the earlier Dutch masters — whose work they knew well — was crucial to the development of the Impressionists' compositions depicting movement through the landscape. The enlargement of the basic communication system as well as new forms of transport — the train (see above, II and III/3) and steamboat — in early-nineteenth-century France made it possible, and therefore desirable, for those who lived in large urban centers to travel, if only occasionally and for short periods. Newspaper columnist Benjamin Gastineau believed that by 1860 travel had become essential as well as liberating: "Traveling is to live; it is to feel disengaged from all social restraint and prejudice." According to Gastineau, any city, especially Paris, was "huge, deceptive and chaotic, [a] vast market[place] where both the foot and the heart slide into the mire."' Travel provided the means to escape the pressures and ugliness of urban exis- tence. A few years earlier Baudelaire had expressed the same sentiment in Les Fleurs du mal (1855), where he called for the train to carry him away from the city and his problems. It was, above all else, the speed with which one could now travel that allowed for the vast ebb and flow of population from the city to the country. The inauguration of the railroad to Saint-Germain-en-Laye as the first major line from Paris in the mid-1 830s eventually led to the construction of over 15,000 miles of track. By the end of the century construction of the six grandes lignes, or major systems, serving all of France (and Europe) had been finished. In addition, new canals were planned and inaugurated, and the om- nibus americain (fig. 37) improved in quality and quantity to keep up with 138 A DAY IN THE COUNTRY " - ArKcntculI fS. el (1.) Hnril.t lit til Svtne I'n i-oiu du nouveau rout Fig. 30. Argenteuil (Seine-et-Oise) I Banks of the Seine/ A Portion of the New Bridge, n.d. Postcard. Centre Documentation Sceaux. Photo: Gloria Groom. the increased demand. Because of these developments, the social as well as the physical geography of France was altered drastically; tourism as a social phenomenon had begun in earnest. The Impressionists sought to provide im- ages of the rapidly expanding horizon of the French population. Rivers, roads, and rails, with their appropriate modes of transport, became the major "modern" motifs in landscape painting in the second half of the century (see above, I-II). The periodic mass exodus into the country made possible by the train and other inexpensive forms of transportation such as the tram not only allowed the urban dweller to reaffirm his humanity away from the hubbub of the city; the countryside and its inhabitants were also affected by increased building and commercial development (see above, II, and below, III/8). The periodical La Vie Parisienne for July 3, 1875, described the Parisians' inva- sion of France as one that took "possession of the countryside as though it were... a cafe concert larger than those of the Champs-Elysees." For those rich enough to avoid cafes, hotels, and the like, life was simpler and more pleasant. The French bourgeoisie bought country houses (see above, III/2), the convenience of which allowed them to spend frequent periods of time in the countryside: The bourgeois villas are going up in all the beautiful locations which surround the capital; entire districts have been built up, some of them of modest construction, some of them luxurious, all of them much to the taste of the Parisian populace which loves the countryside on the condition that it can be quickly transported there. - In the Paris Guide of 1867 Leon Say pointed out in his essay "Les chemins de fer" that Parisians poured out of the city in the summer into an area between four and fifty kilometers from the city "determined by time and by the fare."' As we have seen, it was the sites within precisely these param- eters that the Impressionists, for the most part, chose to depict in the early years (see above, III/2). Some of them focused on signs of industrial interfer- ence in the landscape and on factories (no. 38), bridges (nos. 45-46), and train tracks. In these paintings the man-made improvements of the industrial RIVERS, ROADS, AND TRAINS 139 Cn sympntbique souvenir dc PARIS que je quitte. Fig. 31. A Fond Memory of PARIS, Which I'm Leaving, c. 1900. Postcard. Private Collection, Louveciennes. te>^ B. F., Paris j^o age are embraced by the natural landscape just as the rocks and fallen logs are in works of Courbet and Rousseau. For Monet and the painters who followed him closely, then, the means of getting from one place to another was as much an artistic preoccupation as the towns outside Paris themselves. In Argenteuil, for example, where Mo- net lived and was visited by his painter friends, virtually every aspect of the Seine, upstream and downstream, was treated in his work (fig. 30; map 6). The paths by the river, the small inlets, the roads, and the railroad tracks and bridges of this small resort town a few kilometers .from Paris were examined and re-examined in hundreds of his paintings from 1871 to 1878 (nos. 39— 43). While it is true that the rivers, some of the roads, and the railroad lines of France were essentially public and that therefore a pictorialization of them was a celebration of property held in common by all the people of the nation (see above, II), it is difficult to know without corroboration from the painters themselves whether they believed their depictions of such subjects to be in any way a political statement. In a sense, a depiction of any of the innumer- able construction projects — of viaducts, sewers, railways, roads, and ca- nals— begun and carried out under the Second Empire was such a statement (fig. 31). And yet a comparison of Monet's depictions of the Seine and the bridges around Gennevilliers, Colombes, and Argenteuil with Pissarro's con- temporaneous depictions of Pontoise and the Oise (see below, III/5) reveals the differences with which the same motif might be imbued. Monet's river is the site of bourgeois leisure; the pleasures of boating, promenading, and relaxing are celebrated. Pissarro's paintings of Pontoise, on the other hand, reveal the mundane activities of daily existence: factories and farms, peasants and workmen making use of their proximity to the river for practical ends. Pontoise, of course, was a small commercial town on the Oise River; Argen- teuil, a weekend resort minutes from Paris. Thus their selection of places to live was as much an indication of the philosophical (or political) differences between these two artists as were their visions of the landscapes around them. 140 A DAY IN THE COUNTRY ■).OUM!TI.£V. Ilarfleur. Fig. 32. Charles-Frangois Daubigny (French, 1817-1878), Harfleur. Illustration from Jules Janin, Guide de voyageur de Paris a la mer, 1847. Bibliotheque Historique de la Ville de Paris. Photo: Gloria Groom. Their individual concerns — Pissarro's for Pontoise and Monet's for Argenteuil — also seem to have affected the method by which they realized their landscapes. Monet's paintings participate in the scenes he depicts — his odd perspectives are evidence of his use of a studio boat. This interest in the river shore seen from the water itself was inspired by Daubigny's use of a similar floating studio. In fact, Daubigny's Boat Trip series (1862) and his earlier vignettes entitled Guide for the Traveler from Paris to the Sea (1847) (figs. 32, 34-35) provided Monet with sources of inspiration, although he removed all traces of the presence of the boat itself while Daubigny delighted in revealing his very unusual way of life. Pissarro, in contrast, depicted his views as if firmly rooted on the land. He remained a spectator viewing the landscape as a thing quite apart from himself, but something which he should and must record. This difference in point of view and artistic means employed to con- vey a particular ideological stance is sometimes subde, but always crucial to an examination of these artists' paintings. Monet's work speaks to us as consummately Parisian, in spite of the fact that Paris was his adopted city. Zola remarked that ...as a true Parisian [sic] he brings Paris to the country; he cannot paint a landscape without including well-dressed men and women. Nature seems to lose its interest for him as soon as it does not bear the stamp of our customs... .He is pleased to discover man's trace every where.... He loves with particular affection nature that man makes modern."' Monet was an excited visitor to the landscape he chose to paint, but we are constantly aware that he had purchased a return ticket and that he would leave by whatever means he had selected to come out into the country in the first place. Pissarro, on the other hand, painted in the guise of a timeless RIVERS, ROADS, AND TRAINS 141 Fig. 33. Edouard Baldus (French, 1820-c. 1881), Land- scape near the Chantilly Viaduct. Albumen print from glass negative. 32 x 43 cm. From Album des chemins de fer du Nord, 1855. Bibliotheque Nationale. Photo: Studio Harcourt. inhabitant, viewing with suspicion any intrusion into the rural society which he set down on canvas. Although he maintained his distance, he examined subjectively the features of the essentially provincial, considerably more so- ber landscape about him. These two contrasting concepts characterize for the most part the different subjective points of view presented in the landscape paintings of the Impressionist artists. Although they are diametrically op- posed, however, they both recognize and capture a sense of movement or transitoriness, both physical and temporal. Monet's is as quick and fleeting as the train travel he so readily embraced; Pissarro's, as slow and torpid as the barges he so often painted. It may have been the newly found opportunities of the Parisian middle classes to travel outside the city, as well as the Impressionists' assumption that such people would desire paintings of scenes they observed on their travels, that — more than anything else — encouraged these artists to depict the land- scape of transit. In any event, in response to the increased mobility allowed by the railroads, portable visitors' guides such as those by Joanne (see above, II and III/2) were created for all the major regions of France. The monuments and scenery illustrated in the folio volume Voyages pittoresques et roman- tiques dans I'ancienne France by Baron Isadore Taylor and Charles Nodier (1820-78) or in Album des chemins de fer du Nord (fig. 33) could now be visited firsthand by the interested traveler. Increased speed and accessibility inspired Eugene-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc to state that "the railroad has allowed us to see more monuments within a week than it could previously have been possible to visit in a month."^ By 1876 tourists with guidebooks in hand had become the butt of jokes. Charles-Albert Bertall, m his La Vie hors de chez soi (comedie de notre temps) (1876), described ...tourists, limited to those verificatiotis of a thing's permanent identity, and un- able to provide the nourishment of diversifying by study and by comparison. ..if he does not have the Joanne guidebook in his pocket, he does not even know where he is.'' "If this is Tuesday, it must be Belgium" was obviously not a concept invented in the twentieth century. The decades of the 1860s and '70s were decisive in the formation of a new language of landscape painting for the French Impressionists. This post- 142 A DAI' IN THE COLINTRY CtAkbi Viaduc de Malaunay. Fig. 34. Daubigny, Viaduct of Malaimay. Illustration from Jules Janin, Guide de voya- geur de Paris a la mer, 1847. Bibliotheque Historique de la Ville de Paris. Photo: Gloria Groom. Barbizon visual vocabulary incorporated within itself the jargon of middle- class travel and the experiences which resulted therefrom. Although this lan- guage remained in its nascent stages with some of the artists (for example, Sisley and Guillaumin), with others (Monet, for instance) it provided the basic structure out of which a larger vocabulary could grow and change. We have become accustomed to the Impressionist vision created during these formative years — a genial landscape iconography of meandering roads, flowing waterways, and the more modern severity of railroad tracks piercing the natural terrain. This iconography evoked for these artists, as it does for us today, a sense of movement, of adventure, of visual and intellectual expan- sion. As Henry James wrote in a column for the New York Tribune in which he described a trip from Paris to Le Havre by way of Rouen, "my enjoyment has not been of my goal but of my journey."^ The compositional and iconographical origins of the Impressionist pictorial language of the 1870s do not lie altogether within the realm of the fine art of the past. Although their work was based squarely in the traditional landscape methods of the Academie, distilled and reinterpreted by the artists of Barbizon, as well as in Dutch seventeenth-century painting, the Impres- sionists turned to conceptually different artistic sources as well. These were the popular illustrations — prints produced for French newspapers, journals, guidebooks, and general literature — which began to appear in such extraor- dinary profusion after the 1840s (figs. 34—37). Rather than relying on single prints or illustrations in the creation of specific paintings, however, the Impressionists simply absorbed this explosion of visual data and turned it to their own uses (nos. 39—46). It was precisely this interest in what was tradi- tionally considered to be "low art" that provoked reactions from critics both favorable and hostile to the newly formed movement (see below, IV). Baude- laire and Castagnary, for example, complained of the surfeit of the common- RIVERS, ROADS, AND TRAINS 143 Fig. 35. Daubigny, Maisons-Laffitte. Illustration from Jules Janin, Guide de voyageur de Pans a la mer, 1847. Bibliotheque Historique de la Ville de Paris. Photo: Gloria Groom. Fig. iG. Emile de La Bedolliere (French), The Rustic Pleasures of the Pare du Vesinet. Illustration from Histoire des environs du noitveau Paris, early 1860s, p. 109. Photo: LACMA. Fig. 37. Viaor Geruzez [Crafty] (c. 1840-1906), The Departure of the Last Omnibus americain. Illustration from Souvenirs de la fete de Bougival. Private Collection, Louveciennes. 144 A DAY IN THE COUNTRY ^^-^ . - jt .4 nf i , ^^SmSmL^ ^^^Stttt^^A^^ nl ' -^flK 0. j-ttif. lije , Fig. 38. Sisley, View of the Canal Saint-Mar- tin, 1870. Oil on canvas. 50 x 65 cm. Musee d'Orsay, Galerie du Jeu de Paume, Paris. Photo: ACRACI. place in landscape painting, as well as the lack of distance between the real and the pictorial worlds. They had hoped contemporary landscape painting would somehow rise above the merely descriptive. Other critics, though, could discern that these artists were capable of overcoming the banality of a subject to make something quite exceptional of it. Zola and Jean Rousseau both saw Pissarro, for example, as moving beyond the picturesque to reveal in the landscape a kind of robust and eloquent veracity which had not been examined previously. In the end, the Impressionists created landscapes of transit that were riddled with ambiguities and contradictions. They simply exchanged the idyl- lic landscape fiction of the past for one of their own making. The earlier French interest in painting exotic places was supplanted by a desire for the familiar (fig. 38), a concern to see those sites which were — or which could be — known through personal experience. The Impressionists, in many cases, sought to accommodate the contemporary concern for the familiar in their art. In addition to capturing on canvas, in a specifically modern way, the popular vacation sites and pleasurable outdoor activities made possible by leisure time, they focused on the specific means by which such pastimes and places were being made accessible to an ever-growing public even as they painted. — S. S. Notes 1. Gastineau, 1861, p. 2. I.Martin, 1890, Preface. 3. La Croix (ed.), 1867, vol. II, pp. 1658-1659. 4. Zola, 1959, pp. 131-132. 5. Viollet-le-Duc, 1862, p. 254. 6. Bertall, 1876, p. 11. 7. James, 1952, p. 192. RIVERS, ROADS, AND TRAINS 145 39-43. Claude Monet Argenteuil Basin (Le BaSSIN d'ArCENTEUIL), 1872 The Seine at Argenteuil (La Seine a Argenteuil), 1873 Argenteuil Basin (Le BaSSIN d'ArGENTELUl), 1874 Sailboat at Petit-Gennevilliers (Volier au Petit-Gennevilliers), 1S~4 The Railroad Bridge, Argenteuil (Le Pont du chemin de fer, Argenteuil), 1874 44—45. Pierre- Auguste Renoir The Seine at Argenteuil (La Seine a Argenteuil), c. 1873 The Bridge at Argenteuil (Le Pont d'Argenteuil), 1882 46. Gustave Caillebotte The Bridge over the Seine AT Argenteuil (Le Pont d'Argenteuil et la Seine), 1885 In the second half of the nineteenth cen- tury Argenteuil was a small, self-suffi- cient town 27 kilometers by boat from Paris, although it could be reached even more quickly by the railroad, which first had begun its service there in 1851. Because of the railroad Argenteuil very quickly became one of the most impor- tant resort towns in the immediate vi- cinity of Paris. To get there one boarded the Paris— Saint-Germain-en-Laye train at the Gate Saint-Lazare; it departed every hour between 7:50 a.m. and 9:50 p.m. with an additional return train in the summer leaving at 11:30 p.m. The ten-kilometer trip took twenty-two min- utes with stops at Asnieres, Bois- Colombes, and Colombes, before pro- ceeding across the Seine on the railroad bridge into Argenteuil. On board the more leisurely steamboat, the tourist went through Billancourt, Saint-Cloud, Asnieres, Clichy, Saint-Denis, Epinay, Gennevilliers, and then into Argenteuil. Both means of getting to the town were used by the multitude of Parisians who wanted to escape the city for a day or two of strolling in the fresh air, boat- ing, and sailing (a new recreational sport at the time). Because of the width and depth of the Seine there, Argenteuil quickly became the most popular sailing locale near Paris. Although rapidly becoming a mere suburb of the capital when Monet moved there in December 1871 from Holland (where he had lived for a short time during the Franco-Prus- sian War), Argenteuil was still consid- ered to be in the countryside. Like many other nascent suburbs, however, its attractions were apparent not only to the tourists who visited, but also to devel- opers and industrialists. An increase in population was to alter the town signifi- cantly as it did many other places depicted by the Impressionist painters in the 1870s. Argenteuil's approximately 5,000 inhabitants must have become preoccu- pied with the activities of tourism very soon after 1851, the year the Asnieres— Argenteuil stretch of the Paris-Saint- Germain-en-Laye railway opened. Con- trary to the opinion of Albert Rhodes, a would-be student of the French national psyche, that Frenchmen preferred to live poorly in an urban center rather than to move to the suburbs ("an hour or two of Vincennes or Bougival from time to time suffices for them...."),' by the end of the century Argenteuil's inhabitants had increased and it had become part of the vast array of bland, anonymous suburbs surrounding Paris. Monet's presence in Argenteuil, as well as the life of the place, proved to be attractions for his artist friends, many of whom came from Paris and its environs to visit, to discuss mutual interests, and, of course, to paint the town and sur- rounding countryside. Sisley came in 1872, Renoir in 1873 and again in 1874, and Manet in 1874. The boat basin, crowded with middle-class tourists enjoying themselves at boating, prom- enading, and picnicking on the banks of the Seine, proved to be an irresistible motif. Argenteuil promoted itself as one of the most attractive points along the Seine near Paris for just such activities. As early as August 25, 1850, the town fath- ers sponsored a regatta in order to attract Parisian boating enthusiasts to the area. Eight years later, the town suc- ceeded in luring the prestigious sailing club of the Societe des Regales Parisiennes, the Cercle de la Voile, to relocate in Argenteuil. This resulted in the town's being selected as the site for the International Sailing Competition of 1867. By the time Monet had moved there, mooring space for sailboats, row- boats, and steamboats was at a pre- mium. Combined with the normal com- mercial barge traffic, these craft made for rather crowded waters at this point in the Seine's course. Some artists, such as Pissarro, reveled in the bustle. Others, including Monet, eliminated all evidence of commercial traffic from their paint- ings. These choices are particularly revealing of the artists' interests at the time. The most panoramic of the views of the boat basin at Argenteuil are Monet's Argenteuil Basin of 1872 (no. 39) and Renoir's Bridge at Argenteuil (no. 45) of a decade later. These paintings, in fact, are a veritable catalogue of what the town had to offer the tourist at this time. Top-hatted gentlemen and ladies with parasols stroll along the Promenade, a tree-lined walk on the Argenteuil side of the Seine; other tourists are seated on the bank watching the rowboats, sailboats, and a large steamboat (and three guepes a vapeur in Renoir's painting) in the ba- sin. In the distance is the highway bridge, which had been destroyed in the Franco- Prussian War and quickly rebuilt there- after, and across the river can be seen the township of Gennevilliers. Monet's painting — showing Argenteuil seen on any beautiful Sunday afternoon in the summer — encompasses an enormous amount of the area, even though more than half of the canvas is a study in cloud formations. Renoir's Bridge at Argenteuil (no. 45) embraces less of the same view, which is here separated from the viewer by a screen of trees, a common motif in Impressionist paintings of this period (nos. 13, 19). In both pictures, however, it is the boat basin and its various activi- ties which are the true subject. Caille- botte, on the other hand, pulled his 1885 view of the bridge at Argenteuil and the Seine (no. 46) extremely close to the highway bridge, seen from Petit-Genne- villiers on the opposite side of the Seine. Framed by the curve of the arch is the town of Argenteuil itself. With Caille- botte, however, it was the uniqueness of the viewpoint that was the artist's real concern rather than the particular pan- orama. This use of dramatic perspective. 146 A DAY IN THE COUNTRI' No. 39. Claude Monet Argenteuil Basin, 1872 (delation pp. 322-3Z1) RIVERS, ROADS, AND TRAINS 147 No. 40. Claude Monet The seine at ARCENTtuiu, 18?3 148 A DAY IN THE COLIKTRV No. 41. Claude Monet ARCE.NTEU1L Basin, 1874 RIVERS, ROADS, AND TRAINS 149 No. 42. Claude Monet Sailboat at Petit-Gennevilliers, 1874 150 A DAY IN THE COLINTRY No. 43. Claude Monet The Railroad Bridge, Argenteuil, 1874 RIVERS. ROADS. AND TRAINS 151 No. 44. Pierre-Auguste Renoir The Seine AT Argenteuil, c. 1873 152 A DAY IN THE COUNTRY No. 45. Pierre-Auguste Renoir The Bridge at ABCENTtuii., 1882 RIVERS, ROADS, AND TRAINS 153 something which preoccupied Caille- botte throughout his career, was prob- ably dependent on popular illustrations, in which similar eye-catching experi- ments were constantly used to attract attention. It should be noted that Caillebotte's interest in Argenteuil was more than just for motifs to paint. He and his family owned many pleasure boats and yachts. In fact, five years before he painted this view, Texier fils of Argenteuil had built for Caillebotte and his brothers the first boat in France to make use of silk sails, which was success- ful in its various competitions and was sold a year later. Monet chose the basin as his subject in two paintings of 1874. Argenteuil Ba- sin (no. 41) depicts the Promenade near the Champ de Mars as seen across the boat rental area from Petit-Gennevilliers (the planting on the banks acts as a repoussoir element to thrust the viewer even further into space). To the immedi- ate right would have been the highway bridge. Sailboat at Petit-Gennevilliers (no. 42) was undoubtedly painted from Monet's specially built, floating atelier modeled on Daubigny's (see above. III/ 4). Here, it must have been moored in front of the boat rental house. (Caille- botte's Bridge over the Seine at Argen- teuil depicts the area exactly 90 degrees to the right.) Another view by Monet, Sailboats in the Boat Rental Area (1872; Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco), depicts this same view from a slightly closer vantage point. In both paintings by Monet, two active smokestacks, one on either side of a gabled house, reveal the area's involvement in something less capricious than the tourist trade. From slightly further upstream Mo- net and Renoir also depicted Argenteuil from the Colombes shore of the Petit- Bras of the Seine. In Renoir's Seine at Ar- genteuil (no. 44) the He Marante can just be seen on the left. In the distance are the Chateau du Marais and the factory sheds. Renoir has pulled back slightly and cut off the two buildings seen on the right in Monet's Seine at Argenteuil of the same time and, unlike Monet, has shown the Seine in use; two men in a rowboat glide past and what appears to be a barge disappears around the bend in the river, emphasized by the cleared tow- path. In contrast, Monet's painting shows the scene undisturbed by move- ment. Sisley, probably during the same painting campaign, depicted the identi- cal view seen here {The Seine at Argen- teuil [1872; Private Collection]). Perhaps the most startling, dra- matic, and truly modern view of Argen- teuil Monet painted is The Railroad Bridge, Argenteuil (no. 43) (another ver- sion of the subject, without the sailboat, is in the Musee d'Orsay, Paris). In addi- tion, the painting is, in a way, the quint- essential image of Monet's interest in the landscape during this period. The peace- ful summer day of Argenteuil Basin, painted during the same year, is here fur- ther animated by the introduction of the train streaking across the railroad bridge further down the Seine from the highway bridge as well as by the compositional format Monet chose to use. The gentle sounds of city people at play are here overruled by the implied shrill whistle and mechanical sounds of a train carry- ing goods and passengers from one point to another. The concrete and iron bridge and the train passing over it plunge the viewer deep into the pictorial space in a manner similar to that utilized by il- lustrators of similar scenes from Dau- bigny to the innumerable anonymous artists whose work peppered the con- temporary press.- Juxtaposed with the bridge is a single sailboat. Monet painted this picture standing on the Epinay— Argenteuil side of the bridge looking toward Gennevilliers; the boat rental area was within view on the other side of the highway bridge. From contemporary descriptions of this particular point it is possible to determine that Monet chose to enhance the physical beauty of the area. The industrialization of Argenteuil, indeed of all France, as well as the means utilized by her citizens to enjoy the lei- sure time created by that industrializa- tion, are nowhere more definitively pre- sented than in this painting. This iconography of modern river- scapes owes its inspiration and syntax to contemporary illustrations and popular prints. There is no question that these crude graphics lack the eloquence and physical beauty of Monet's paintings, for example. In their own way, however, they exhibit a masterly ability to capture the panorama of modern life quickly and without pretense. Today they strike us as insignificant and banal in the same way, in fact, that Impressionist painting must have appeared to some members of its contemporary audience. To peruse the ephemera of the 1860s and the '70s is to rediscover the foundations upon which the Impressionists presented to an af- fronted public the familiar landscape of their world, but in a radically new style. Notes 1. Rhodes, c. 1875, p. 80. I.Tucker, 1982, pp. 70-75. 47. Claude Monet On the Seine at Bennecourt (Au BORD D£ l'eAU, BeNNECOURt), 1868 Bennecourt is a small village situated in the elbow of the Seine about three miles southeast of Giverny. Myriad small and large islands dot the Seine between Bennecourt and Gloton on the right bank, and Bonnieres and Jeufosse on the left. In the mid-nineteenth century Bennecourt's economy was essentially based on agriculture, particularly the cultivation of fruit and the making of wine. Two years before Monet painted On the Seine at Bennecourt, Cezanne had visited the town, which he may have known through the paintings and etch- ings of Daubigny and his son from the previous decade. He certainly would have known of it through several of his friends, including Zola, who lived there on and off between 1866 and 1871 and who wrote several of his novels and sto- ries there, including La Riviere, Therese Raquin, and L'Oeuvre. Because Monet's work of the late 1860s was, in a sense, experimental (like that of his compatriots Sisley, Renoir, and Bazille), he reworked and reused his canvases at later dates. As a result, this painting is the only picture of Benne- court that survives from the early period. However, Monet returned to this site 15 years later in a number of winter land- scapes showing the town veiled by frosty mists, his house at Giverny (nos. 91—93) being only a very short distance away. In this painting, Monet depicted his mistress (later, his first wife), Camille Doncieux, seated beneath a tree on the largest island in the Seine at this point; the rowboat in which they traveled to get 154 A DAY IN THE COUNTRY No. 46. Gustave Caillebotte TirE Bridge over the Seine at Arcenteuil, 18S5 RIVERS. ROADS, AND TRAINS 155 No. 47. Claude Monet On the Seine at Bennecoubt, 1 868 (detail on pp. 50~S1) 156 A DAY IN THE COUNTRY CVwwCi^^ V xV-^^N t No. 48. Claude Monet Trai.s- [n the Countryside, c. 1870-71 RIVERS, ROADS, AND TRAINS 157 there is moored nearby. In the grand tradition of early nineteenth-century Romantic painting, she looks, with pro- file perdu (a pose which allows us only to glimpse her face) at the houses of Gloton. The lofty associations conjured by Romantic artists are here suppressed, however, by Monet's obvious delight in color and light and by the beautiful sur- face qualities of the whole. His clarity of vision and composition, perhaps reliant on similar effects in contemporary photography (see below, V), imbued the painting — whose focus is the river it- self— with an objectivity which com- pletely liberates the scene from its possi- bly sentimental constraints. 48. Claude Monet Train in the Countryside (Train dans la campagne), c. 1870-71 49. Pierre-Auguste Renoir Oarsmen at Chatou (Les Canotiers a Chatou), 1879 Few paintings reveal so perfectly and succinctly the "improved" landscape of nineteenth-century France. Monet's small picture depicts ladies with parasols and small children engaging in prom- enades in the country. Passing on an embankment is the train, that mechani- cal invention which allowed Parisians of various classes to participate in the plea- sures to be found in the countryside. Hidden by the trees, the locomotive's presence is suggested by the puffs of steam that indicate the direction in which the train is moving. Insouciantly integrated into the landscape, much like a temple in a painting by Claude, the train provides the viewer with a focus as his eve moves slowly into the distance in order to appreciate the whole landscape. Monet's picture shows the Saint- Germain branch of the Pans — Saint- Germain-en-Laye railroad line, the earli- est to be inaugurated in France (see above, III/4). The height of the embank- ment suggests that the site of the painting must lie between Rueil and Chatou. The wagons a I'wiperiale, or double-decker cars, crowded with holiday-seekers charmingly, even disarmingly, silhouet- ted against the sky, were a feature unique to this particular line. By 1864 the train ran every hour (with additional depar- tures scheduled during the summer) at a very low cost, although there was a sur- charge on weekends. As early as 1848, only two years after this branch had opened, the anonymous author of an article in L'lUustration criticized this policy of increasing fees on the only days when people could shake off "the heavy chain" that bound them to "the mer- chant's bank, the office of the man of af- fairs, the painter's atelier, or the employ- ee's desk."' Even artists, then, seem to have discovered the beauty of this site very early on in the century. Renoir's Oarsmen at Chatou reveals the summer pleasures awaiting those who got off the train depicted in Monet's painting. (The line continued to Le Vesinet, Le Pecq, and, finally, to Saint- Germain-en-Laye.) Located on the right bank of the Seine across from Rueil and just south of Argenteuil, Bezons, and Carrieres-Saint-Denis, Chatou was becoming a popular place for the rich to build country houses and for the mem- bers of other classes to visit on week- ends. In fact, it was one of the oldest sub- urbs of Paris. By this time it had become a rival of Asnieres as a place to go for pleasure-boating. Joanne's guide of 1881 describes the town as a paradise for anglers as well as canotiers.- LInlike other paintings by Renoir of this site in which the figures become mere staffage (as, for example, in Seme at Chatou [1880; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston]), here the subject of the picture is the figures — the boaters and well- wishers, including the artist's own well- dressed friends Caillebotte and Aline Charigot, Renoir's future wife. The Seine is depicted here in its role as provider of enjoyment and relaxation. Renoir's great Luncheon of the Boating Party (1881; The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.) illustrates the lunch-time activities of these weekend sailors at the Restau- rant Fournaise in Chatou. In the latter picture, as in Oarsmen at Chatou, Re- noir has captured the quality of a day in the country in liquid strokes of pure color. Notes 1. L'lUustration, Oct. ~, 1848, p. 93. 2. A.Joanne, 1881, pp. 144-145. 50. Eugene Boudin Landscape with Washerwomen/ Le Faou, the Harbor at Low Tide (Paysage aux lavandieres/ Le Faou, le porta maree basse), 1873 Boudin devoted a large part of his career to painting the far reaches of the north- ern and western French coastline, from the chic resort towns of Le Havre and Trouville to the quiet backwaters of the Finistere. Le Faou, a tiny village 561 ki- lometers from Paris, is 19 kilometers from Quimper. It is described by Paul Joanne in his Dictionnaire geographique et administratif de la France (1872) as being at the bottom of the estuary of the Brest basin. Although trains coming from Paris (one could board them at the Gate d'Orleans) ran very near Quimper at Lorient, its size, distance, and so- ciological make-up were unattractive to the Impressionists. Although Boudin painted here, his major interest seems to have been in reducing the site to a for- mula like those used in paintings by such seventeenth-century Dutch artists as the Ruisdaels or Jan van Goyen. The pic- ture's surface of crusty impasto evenly applied and the objective examination of detail reveal Boudin's contribution to French painting of the period. 51. Armand Guillaumin The Arcueil Aqueduct at Sceaux Railroad Crossing (L'Aql'EDL'C a Arcueil, eigne de Sceaux), c. 1874 Guillaumin's painting, possibly dating to the summer of 1874, when the architec- tural decoration of the newly completed Aqueduc de la Vanne was finished, depicts the point where the aqueduct — which separates Arcueil from Cachan — leaps the Paris— Sceaux railway line immediately south of Paris. People can be seen waiting at a small, covered sta- tion in the distance. To the left, a graded road alive with human traffic provides yet another link between Arcueil and Cachan. The Paris-Sceaux line had been inaugurated 30 years earlier; from the Gate de Luxembourg in Paris it took only a matter of minutes to reach Ar- cueil, a few kilometers away. Thus in one 158 A DAI- IN THE COLINTRY No. 49. Pierre-Auguste Renoir Oarsmen at chatou, 1879 RIVERS, ROADS, AND TRAINS 159 No. 50. Eugene Boudin Landscape WITH Washerwomen, 1873 160 A DAY IN THE COUNTRY No. 51. Armand GuillauTTiin The Arcueil Aqueduct at Sceaux Railroad Crossing, c. 1874 RIVERS, ROADS. AND TRAINS 161 No. 52. Armand Guillaumin Environs of Parcs, c. 1874 (detail on p. 136) 162 A DAY IN THE COUNTRY No. 53. Camille Pissarro Railway Crossing at Pahs, near Pontoise, 1873-74 RIVERS. ROADS. AND TRAINS 263 painting Guillaumin has revealed three of the most important aspects of the me- chanically improved French landscape of the nineteenth century: the road, the railroad, and the aqueduct. The Aqueduc de la Vanne was listed in all the contemporary guidebooks as one of the major sites of this region because of its historical, aesthetic, and technological importance. It linked the Roman aqueduct of Arcueil, celebrated by Pierre de Ronsard in the sixteenth century, with the structure commis- sioned in 1613 by Marie de Medici and designed by Salomon de Brosse to pro- vide water for her new Palais de Luxem- bourg. In 1867 the system was further enlarged and reinforced with Portland cement by Eugene Belgrand; by the time its architectural embellishments had been completed, it already had been in operation for some time. In the nineteenth century Arcueil, with a population of about 5,300, was a small town which could be reached by train from Paris or by stagecoach by way of the post road from the Porte d'Or- leans. Because it was situated in a valley which possessed both natural beauty and historical importance (Etienne Jodelle, like Ronsard a member of the Pleiade, and the Marquis de Sade had chateaus there), many bourgeois built country houses in the area. 52. Armand Guillaumin Environs of Paris (Environs de Paris), c. 1874 The subject of Guillaumin's painting, the road which snakes through the fore- ground, is a carefully constructed and newly graded one with recently planted trees placed at regular intervals — a pub- lic highway, in short, created for the gen- eral good. Its presence in the landscape outside Paris in no way interferes with nature. In fact, quite the opposite is true. The "improved" landscape, because of man's activities, has been made more effectual, more commodious, and more attractive. It is now a landscape of convenience that allows travelers and their goods to move from one place to another more efficaciously than before. Nothing could be more mundane or more modern (see above, II). The identification of the site of Guillaumin's painting has proved elu- sive. However, it has been suggested that a comparison with Sisley's Road to Verrieres (1872; Private Collection) might be helpful in this regard.' The compositions are similar and the land- scapes depicted have a great deal in com- mon. Verrieres-le-Buisson, near Igny, is thirteen kilometers southwest of Paris and four kilometers southwest of Sceaux in the forest of Verrieres. However, as Sisley's painting depicts only a road to that town, it could be anywhere in the region in which he painted — at Ver- sailles, Sevres, Meudon, or Ville-d'Avray. Note 1. R. Brettell, oral communication. 53. Camille Pissarro Railway Crossing at Patis, near pontoise (La Barriere du chemin de fer, av Patis pres Pontoise), 1873-74 Pissarro lived in and around Pontoise for the better part of two decades, beginning in 1863 and ending with his departure for nearby Osny 20 years later (see above, III/2, and below, II1/5). Les Patis was adjacent to I'Ermitage, between Eragny and Pontoise, 30 kilometers north of Paris. The houses of the farmers and factory workers in the area form an amphitheater around the Oise River and the Nesles plateau in the Viosne valley. This area proved to be attractive to Dau- bigny and other earlier artists who en- joyed its peaceful, remarkably undif- ferentiated river views of slowly moving water and still foliage. Pissarro, on the other hand, though surrounded by the same motifs, chose very different aspects of the area to record on canvas. Railivay Crossing at Patis, near Pontoise is a subject of almost shocking banality. A road races into the distance while a railroad barrier abruptly closes off the space. (Such barriers were much higher in Pissarro's time than they are today and were kept lowered until they had to be raised, rather than vice versa.) Two peasants walk toward each other on a broad, graded road. A wall and gate house on the right and a severely abbre- viated, grassy shoulder on the left close off our vision and force it directly to the barrier and beyond to the hills of Eragny. The telegraph pole and wood bar- rier indicate the presence of the tracks of the railway line, built the decade before, to connect Saint-Ouen-l'Aumone (and ultimately Paris) with Pontoise. There is no hint of the picturesque in Pissarro's painting, nor of the sentimental or romantic. The view is utterly devoid of emotional or historical reference. In this sense it is unrelentingly and insistently modern (see above, II). 54. Claude Monet Springtime, through the Branches (Le Printemps, a travers les branches), 1878 In the spring of 1878 Monet did a num- ber of paintings on the southern tip of the He de la Grande Jatte on the north- west outskirts of Paris, between Neuilly and Courbevoie. In this work Monet painted the few houses on the shore of the Seine at Courbevoie as seen through the branches of willow trees growing on the banks of the island. Because the site lacks particularization, it must be as- sumed that Monet's main concern was with the composition. The painting is conceived with a strong repoussoir pat- tern of trees that almost obliterates any view into the distance. The Seine, which is revealed in other works by Monet as having been a great playground for the Parisians at Argenteuil (nos. 39—43), is here reduced to little more than one of a series of barriers discouraging the viewer from analyzing anything except, to a limited degree, several nondescript houses seen across it. Monet's ability to reduce the branches and leaves to a sur- face pattern cut off at both top and bot- tom is particularly to be noted. 55. Claude Monet Floating Ice on the Seine (Debacle sur la Seine), 1880 The winter of 1879-80 was particularly severe in France. Newspaper accounts could only compare it to the winter of the Franco-Prussian War, exactly a dec- ade before.' The snow paralyzed Paris and its environs, and the transportation system of the He de France came to a halt. The Seine was completely frozen over. In January a thaw came, but was in- 164 A DAY IN THE COUNTRY No. 54. Claude Monei Springtime, through the Branches, 1 878 RIVERS. ROADS, AND TRAINS 165 No. 55. Claude Monet Floating Ice on the Seine, 1880 166 A DAY IN THE COUNTRY No. 56. Alfred Sisley The Seine near By, 1881 RIVERS, ROADS, AND TRAINS lei terrupted by an immediate drop in tem- perature. At this moment Monet, in a great burst of activity, began to depict the landscape in and around Vetheuil, where he Hved beginning in 1878 (having left Argenteuil in 1876). Vetheuil was a small, charming village on the river mid- way between Mantes and Vernon, just northwest of Paris. The resulting paint- ings were Monet's earliest works follow- ing the death of his first wife, Camille, at the end of the previous summer. Al- though the pathetic fallacy is invoked most often with disastrous results, some- how it is consoling to know that these desolate, but extraordinary, winter land- scapes were painted at this most poig- nant moment in Monet's life. Floating Ice on the Seine was one of 18 paintings done in the first few months of 1880 following the breakup of the ice on the river. This picture seems to have served as a sketch or as an experimental version for a larger painting (Shelburne Museum) which Monet submitted for inclusion in the Salon of 1880. In^spite of the fact that he felt that this larger com- position was "a more prudent, more bourgeois thing" than his other paint- ings, as he wrote in a contemporary let- ter to Theodore Duret,^ it was rejected. What Monet meant by this comment can only be inferred. The utterly symmetrical and classical composition of Floating Ice on the Seine's mirror-imaged sky and water, which almost meet at the golden mean of the canvas; its total lack of specificity; and its avoidance of anything modern in its subject matter — in spite of its technical freedom — may have been what Monet was referring to. The art- ist's concern here seems to have been less with the landscape itself than with how he could distribute it across the surface of the canvas. Both in spite of, and because of, the surface pattern, the pictorial space is almost negated. In the end, however, Monet depicted nature at its most grand and its most ar- tificial. Although Floating Ice on the Seine is a picture within the early-nine- teenth-century landscape tradition, its facture reveals its extraordinary moder- nity despite its traditional subject. Notes 1. See Le Petit Journal, Dec. 7, 1879. 2. Wildenstein, 1974-79, vol. I, p. 438. 56-57. Alfred Sisley The Seine near By (La Seine vue des coteaux de By), 1881 The Bridge at Moret (Pont de Moret), 1893 In competition with his Impressionist colleagues Sisley sought desperately to provide pictures of old-fashioned land- scapes in a traditional format for bour- geois Parisian collectors. Although — or perhaps because — he utilized pictur- esque motifs found in places popular with an earlier generation, however, Sisley's work proved to be totally un- successful. His search for a format which would find buyers eluded him through- out his career. By 1880 Sisley had established him- self in the small village of Veneux-Nadon in the forest of Fontainebleau, a short walk from Moret-sur-Loing, the town at the junction of the Loing and the Seine rivers that was a two-hour train ride from the Gare de Lyon in Paris. In 1882 he moved to Moret itself. The area, as he wrote to Monet in an attempt to lure him there, had very picturesque views.' Sisley remained there, with the exception of short trips, until his death in 1899, recording on canvas views of the town and its surrounding villages and land- scape. Just two kilometers north of Veneux-Nadon is the hamlet of By, where Rosa Bonheur lived and where Sisley painted The Seine near By. Here, Sisley has reduced the presence of man to a few small buildings; the town of Champagne on the other side of the river is hardly alluded to. The hills slope gent- ly down to the river. Dividing the canvas diagonally into halves, one devoted to earth, the other to sky, with a view into extreme depth, Sisley's composition is dependent on Monet's views of Vetheuil (such as View of Vetheuil [1880; Los An- geles County Museum of Art]) of the year before. His attempt to reinterpret Monet's work proved to be unsuccessful in terms of finding the buyers he so des- perately sought, however. Sisley must have known Moret from his earlier stay at Marlotte (no. 11), as Moret was just less than 10 kilometers southwest of that hamlet. His Bridge at Moret was painted when he lived near Notre-Dame-de-Grace at the corner of the rues Montmartre and Donjon. Al- though the picture appears to record those features of the town mentioned by all the contemporary guidebooks, that is, the bridge, the mills, and the church, upon closer examination it becomes clear that Sisley's main interest here was in the bridge as an active and vital con- ductor of traffic across the Loing. Look- ing southwest into the town, the bridge is telescoped; the large central mills, the Moulin de Graciot on the right, and the Moulin de Provencher on the opposite side, have been emphasized at the expense of the church and the Medieval town gate in the center of the bridge whose steep, squared-off roof can be seen rising above the gabled mill to the right. In fact, Sisley took the most pictur- esque aspects of Moret and willfully obliterated them by using a selective point of view. Note l.Daulte, 1959, p. 31. 58. Paul Signac The Seine at Herblay (BORDS DE riviere, LA SeINE A Herblay), 1889 Four railroad stops beyond Argenteuil on the right bank of the Seine (as one goes toward the sea), twenty-one kilome- ters northwest of Paris, is the small town of Herblay. The village is a few kilome- ters past La Frette, which was popular with Parisian weekend tourists who came by boat to spend a day in the coun- try. In 1889, when Signac came to Herblay and his artist friend Maximilien Luce joined him a few months later, Herblay was beginning to institute a major sewage and water transport sys- tem. In spite of this activity, however, the town decreased in population during this time. This painting belongs to a series of four pictures Signac executed at this site, inspired by John Ruskin's Elements of Draiving (1852), parts of which he and Henri-Edmond Cross translated for the Brussels publication L'Art moderne in 1889. The picture almost appears to have been painted from a floating atelier like that used by Daubigny and, later, Monet (no. 41). The town of Herblay is 168 A DAY IN THE COUNTRY No. 57. Alfred Sislcy The Bridge at Moret, 1893 RIVERS. ROADS, AND TRAINS 169 No. 58. Paul Signac The Seine AT Herblay, iS 170 A DAY IN THE COUNTRY No. 59. Alfred Sisley The Road, View of Sevres Path, Louveciennes, 1873 RIVERS, ROADS, AND TRAINS 171 reflected in the still water. The twelfth- century church tower without its spire dominates the small hamlet; the poplars on the other shore of the river balance the composition. Man is set to one side, nature to the other. The calm, watery di- vider between the two is broken by a small boat sailing toward Paris, its wake providing a mirrored image of the sky above. The small dots of color placed evenly across the surface of the painting quiver against the strain of Signac's at- tempt to provide a deep, central reces- sion into depth. The dichotomy between the artist's pointillist technique and the type of subject — and composition — he chose to depict is particularly strong. 59. Alfred Sisley The Road, View of Sevres Path, louveciennes (La Route, vue du chemin de Sevres), 1873 This painting is among the most boldly conceived of Sisley's landscapes and took its composition almost directly from the series of road landscapes painted by Mo- net and Pissarro on the route de Ver- sailles, also in Louveciennes, between 1869 and 1872 (see above, III/2). Al- though its title has traditionally been ac- cepted, it is incorrect. The painting actu- ally represents the route departementale, or main county road, from Bougival to Louveciennes. On the right are the gate buildings leading to Mme. du Barry's famous country residence.^ Rather than having made this topographically and historically interesting structure the mo- tif of his landscape, however, Sisley sim- ply included it as the anchor for the right half of his carefully balanced compo- sition. The true subject of the painting is the road and its series of trees planted by the State. Indeed, the equidistant place- ment of the trees and the fact that they were carefully pruned so as to form a band of foliage in the spring and summer make it clear that this is an "official" road, designed with the allees that cut through the forests and parks of the French aristocracy in mind. Here, Sisley has painted the road in what one might call the "off season"; the laughter from La Grenouillere (no. 14), just minutes on foot from this spot, is far from our minds. — R. B. Note 1. Sisley painted this motif another time m 1874; see Daulte 145. 60. Alfred Sisley Autumn: Banks of the Seine near Bougival/ Autumn: Banks of the Oise (L'avtomne sur les bords de l'Oise), 1873 Traditionally titled Autumn: Banks of the Oise, this superb landscape was un- doubtedly painted along the Seine near Bougival. The sharp bend of the river and the configuration of the hillsides suggest that Sisley set his easel on the path along the river near the suburban town of Malmaison and pamted looking downriver toward Bougival. He had depicted the town from the other direc- tion earlier in the same year (The Bridge at Bougival [Private Collection, New York]) and made at least 20 other paint- ings of the Seine between Bougival and Port-Marly during the 1870s. The large structure that peeks through the foliage at the right is probably the end of the aqueduct at Louveciennes, which Sisley painted in 1874 (The Aqueduct at Marly [The Toledo Museum of Art]). Executed on a fresh, clear autumn day, this picture is a celebration of the most fleeting aspect of that transitional season. The brilliant yellow of the foliage and the bright blue of the sky mingle in the tranquil waters of the Seine. Sisley's inclusion of a small ferry at its or- namented dock suggests that this perfect reflection soon will be broken. A well- dressed woman with a little girl walks toward the boat, and, in front of them, a little boy runs to hold its departure. Thus the landscape is in two senses transitory; Sisley has investigated here a shift in sea- sons just as he has a departure which will spoil the reflected glories of autumn. Compositionally, this picture has its roots in the river landscapes painted by Daubigny throughout the 1860s and '70s along the Oise River. It is perhaps for this reason that the picture acquired its mistaken title. — R. B. 172 A DAY IN THE COLINTR'l' No. 60. Alfred Sisley Autumn: Banks of the Seine near Boucival, 1 873 RIVERS, ROADS, AND TRAINS 173 r'^l^^ Ill/ 5 Pissarro, Cezanne, and the School of Pontoise IF THE REGION AROUND BouGiVAL, Louveciennes, and Marly-le-Roi pro- vided the Impressionists with their first opportunities to paint a truly modern, suburban landscape (see above, III/2), the environs of Pontoise became the center for rural landscape painting (map 7). Dominated by the presence of Camille Pissarro, a group of painters who came to be known as the school of Pontoise worked intensely in the landscape between that town and Auvers during the 1870s and early 1880s, when the other major center of Impressionist painting was the Seine at the large suburban town of Argenteuil (see above, III/4). It is fascinating to observe that — in spite of the close pictorial relationships among works done by Monet, Pissarro, Renoir, and Sisley around Bougival — these artists split into apparently separate groups after the Commune. Monet centered himself in Argenteuil, rarely moving from that region; Sisley remained in the near western suburbs around Bougival; and Pissarro repaired to Pontoise. There is no evidence that they visited each other frequently at these sites; they tended to meet in Paris and to paint in isolation. For that reason the different locales they chose were an important component of their increasingly separate landscape aesthetics. The school of Pontoise created an Impressionism which emphasized the work of the fields and the continuing life of hamlets and villages, a mode which must be read as a Counterbalance to the Impressionism of leisure of Monet, Renoir, Caillebotte, and, to a lesser extent, Sisley. Paintings by the school of Pontoise were criticized in reviews of early Impressionist exhibi- tions for the vulgarity of their subjects — cabbage patches, rural paths, and farmyards. The style of these paintings was thought to be as crude as their subjects. Indeed, the Impressionists of the school of Pontoise created a rural brand of pictorial naturalism that departed dramatically from what seems by comparison to have been the poetic realism of the Barbizon school. As such, 175 Map 7. Pontoise and Environs. "'%gty\'?\^2t» their pastoral mode was as aggressively new as the Impressionism of leisure of the school of Argenteuil. In order to fully understand the school of Pontoise, one must know something of the nature of the town in which its members lived and painted. ' Possessor of a distinguished history which stretched back into the Middle Ages, the town of Pontoise had been the fortified border capital of a proud, self-conscious region called the Vexin. Situated on a well-protected hillside above the Oise River, Pontoise cast a wary eye on the plains of Montmorency that stretched from the Oise uninterrupted into Paris (fig. 39). Its ecclesias- tical institutions — monastic and otherwise — were wealthy and powerful, and its population in the fourteenth century was considerably larger than it was during the nineteenth century. Meaning Uterally "bridge over the Oise," Pontoise was the point of contact between the entire Vexin, a region rich in wheat fields since Roman times, and the great capital cit)' of Paris. Yet since Pontoise was a capital, it was, to a degree, independent of influence from the capital of the Seine and of France. It was a provincial town proud of a history which was decidedly anti-Parisian. By the middle of the nineteenth century Pontoise had waned in signifi- cance. Railroads had penetrated the Vexin and the religious institutions that had given it real importance had been all but totally destroyed following the Revolution. Its links to Paris became stronger as the railroad arrived in its twin city, Saint-Ouen-l'Aumone, in 1846 and in Pontoise itself in 1864, and Pontoise came increasingly to have the character of a suburban town built on the ruins of a provincial capital. As the Oise was dredged to become the con- nector between the Seine and the newly built canals of the industrially rich north, more and more barges sailed the river, and, as a consequence, small factories devoted to the manufacturing of paint and of sugar from sugar beets began to spring up along its banks. Parisian businessmen, ever on the lookout for pleasant sites for their weekend and summer residences, recognized, to a 176 A DAY IN THE COUNTRY limited extent at least, the charms of the region around Pontoise, perhaps the chief of which was easy accessibihty to Paris. Even the agriculture of the town and the surrounding region was modernized; as a result, the valleys and hill- sides came increasingly to be used as truck gardens for the expanding fruit and vegetable markets in Paris (see below, III/7). When Pissarro arrived in Pontoise with his mistress and their two chil- dren to set up house in January 1866, there was one small factory in the town, and the railroad station had just opened two years before. A litho- graphic panorama of the town published in 1 864 as part of the celebration of Pontoise's railroad shows us the town not from the river, its traditional source of power and wealth, but from the station (fig. 40). In fact, it was the train that enabled Pissarro and his many friends to make the landscape sur- rounding this suburban capital familiar to people throughout the world. The daily train to Pontoise left the Gate du Nord in Paris at 9:30 a.m. and arrived only 45 minutes later. Once at the station, the hamlets of Les Patis and I'Ermitage, the hillsides known as the Cote des Grouettes, the Cote des Boeufs, and the Jalais, and the paths along the Seine to such places as Valhermay and Chaponval were easily accessible on foot (fig. 41). We know the names of these sites today because they were depicted by the paint- ers of the Pontoise school, although the archives and newspapers of the nine- teenth century make no reference whatsoever to these artists, almost as if they had never lived in and around the town. Yet the landscape titles pre- ferred by them, particularly by Pissarro, show an intense familiarity with Pontoise and its surroundings, naming not only the appropriate town or vil- lage, but also the path, street, hillside, or area depicted. The precision of these titles is not in itself unusual — landscape paintings made in the forest of Fon- tainebleau in the mid-lSOOs could be equally precise (see above, I). What is fascinating is that no one who did not live in Pontoise could have recognized such places. Unlike the names of famous rocks or trees in the forest of Fon- tainebleau, the paths and hillsides of Pontoise were rarely — if ever — men- tioned in guidebooks and were not in the least "places to see." Their inclusion in painting titles assures us that this or that humble landscape is neither a composite nor a hypothetical landscape concocted by the painter, but the representation of a real — and verifiable — place. Why Pontoise? The answer is perhaps not as easy as those to the re- lated questions "Why Bougival?" and "Why Argenteuil?" The Oise was not Fig. 39. General View of the Banks of the Oise, 1849. Postcard. Fig. 40. Bird's-eye View of Pontoise, c. 1890. Postcard. PISSARRO, CEZANNE, AND THE SCHOOL OF PONTOISE 177 3lf' POS'TOISE. — {''•r priif Su liaui Soir.t-Mct'tin. — SD Phc!. \\ PcnIcisC — L'Hi milage - rjnorama Figs. 41—42. Pontoise. — Vteiv from Haut Saint-Martin; Pontoise. — I'Ermitage. — Pan- orama, c. 1890. Postcards. wide enough to make sailboating very pleasurable or easy. There were no great gardens or collections of old and imposing country residences as at Louveciennes and Marly-le-Roi (see above, III/2). Le Notre had worked on the gardens of the Chateau de Pontoise for Cardinal Richelieu, but no trace of these existed except in the town archives or in old prints. Nor were the charms of Pontoise extolled in guidebooks with the same fervency as those of the other suburban towns pamted by the Impressionists. It was, in fact, the rural nature of the region around Pontoise that was its most significant char- acteristic (fig. 42). The major reason for a Parisian to go there was not to boat or eat, as at Bougival, but to go to a rural fair like the famous Foire de la Saint-Martin or to a regional market. There were many traditional farms near Pontoise and a large population of agricultural workers who tilled the fields and tended their animals. In fact, it is arguably true to say that the region around Pontoise was the most accessible rural landscape to Paris, and Pontoisians were known in the capital on the Seine not as suburbanites, but as provincial boobs, as a drawing by Dore makes abundantly clear (fig. 43). Perhaps the most important reason that so many important artists painted in this small area was the sheer variety of its landscape. Any of the members of the school of Pontoise — Pissarro, Cezanne, Guillaumin, Gauguin, or the other, minor figures — could paint rolling wheat fields, gently sloping hills, cliffs, rivulets, gardens, river-scapes (figs. 44—45), factories, traditional villages, country houses (fig. 46), markets, barnyards, and for- ests— all without walking more than 15 minutes from their various homes. Although not as famous as other Impressionist sites, Pontoise was simply richer and, as a result, more — and more varied — landscapes representing it were painted during the 1870s than of any other major site. Artists of widely diverse sensibilities could sustain themselves as landscape painters in and around the town. It was perhaps Dr. Paul Cachet, the homeopathic physician for, and friend of, Pissarro's mother, who suggested that the painter and his family come to Pontoise. He certainly helped to find them a house — the first of several rented dwellings occupied by Pissarro and his family during the next decade — at 1, rue du Fond de TErmitage in the hamlet of I'Frmitage in 1866, and Pissarro visited the doctor frequently in his own large house in nearby Auvers (figs. 47—48). One might wonder, in fact, why Pissarro decided to move to Pontoise and not Auvers. The smaller town further up the Oise River US A DA"!' IN THE COUNTRY was at once more beautiful and more famous than Pontoise, and it was the site preferred by Daubigny, who visited there frequendy beginning in 1860 and built a house for himself in nearby Villiers-de-Lisle-Adam in 1864. Co- rot, Daumier, Henriet, and many other landscape painters visited Daubigny, and Corot painted decorations for his house. Daubigny was even mentioned as the painter of Auvers in the 1862 edition of Les Chemins de fer illustres: Les Environs de Paris. It was probably to escape those associations with an already-famous landscape painter that the young Pissarro chose Pontoise. It was significantly un-pictured when he arrived there in 1866. In fact, his own presence — and the brilliance of his earliest landscapes painted in I'Ermitage — brought Dau- bigny to that site, which the older artist painted several times and which was the subject of his entry to the Salon of 1 874, the year of the first Impressionist exhibition, in which Pissarro himself exhibited several landscapes painted near Pontoise. In any case, Pissarro seems to have worried continuously about the presence of Daubigny, for, in all the years he painted in Pontoise — and in spite of the fact that he visited Cachet and Cezanne in Auvers — Pissarro never painted a landscape there. If Daubigny surrounded himself with his friends in Auvers, Pissarro did the same thing in Pontoise. Indeed, the fatherly painter who played such an active role in the formation of the Impressionist movement was the great teacher of his generation. Like Corot, who had so many students that he himself joked about their number, Pissarro was happiest when he worked with other, preferably young artists. It was undoubtedly easier to tolerate what must have been the tedious society of Pontoise in the supportive com- pany of friends and fellow artists, and the Pissarro household not only pro- duced a second generation of painters of its own, but fed and sustained a whole group of young artists from the difficult Cezanne through the relative unknowns Edouard Beliard and Victor Vignon to the brilliant, egomaniacal Gauguin. Although there is not a wealth of documentary material describing the life of the school of Pontoise, Henriet's books about landscape painters, published through the last third of the nineteenth century, give us a clear idea of the social and intellectual world of painters who lived in isolation from their "host" society, depicting the landscape without interacting with its inhabitants. - The landscapes painted around Pontoise by members of its school are, for the most part (no. 61), self-consciously rural. Sailboats, factories, or bourgeois gardens rarely appear; thatched cottages, orchards, fields, village paths, farmyards, and kitchen gardens are common. Although Pissarro him- self had managed to "ruralize" even the suburban landscape of Louveciennes (see above, III/2), he had ampler material in Pontoise for a sustained inves- tigation of the texture of a village landscape. And it was the vernacular archi- tecture of the hamlets surrounding the town and the anonymous, mundane rhythms of life in them that appealed to the artist and his friends. Their land- scapes. Impressionist though they might be in style and in their exploration of the temporal aspects of nature, represent ordinary hamlets and villages, many of which were little touched by the upheavals of industrial modernism that created the landscape painted by the Pontoise painters' colleagues in nearby Argenteuil. When they were, the Pontoise school chose to use carefully se- lected evidence of "improvement" as a foil for a celebration of traditional ruralism (nos. 62, 65). . JABRIVE DE PONTOISE'. Fig. 43. After Gustave Dore (French, 1832- 1888), I Arrive from Pontoise!...." Postcard. Bibliotheque Nationale, Serie Topographique. PISSARRO, CEZANNE, AND THE SCHOOL OF PONTOISE 179 rosroiSE. — uoin i nu sri, Figs. 44—45. Pontoise. — The Oise at lie Saint-Martin; Banks of the Oise at Pontoise, c. 1890. Postcards. The great critic Duret was the first to recognize the rural character of Pissarro's sensibihty and to encourage him (in a letter of December 6, 1873) to paint in a manner appropriate to his imagery.^ For Duret, the proper sub- ject matter for Pissarro was "rustic agrarian nature with animals" and not the sailboats, railroad bridges, and flower gardens upon which Monet ex- ercised what Duret called his "fantastic eye." Duret advised Pissarro to stress in his painting "a power of the brush" that the critic considered to be the essential characteristic of Pissarro's aesthetic* Duret's remarks make particular sense when we confront a series of rural landscapes painted by Pissarro and his friends in and around Pontoise. These pictures tend more often than not to be strongly painted with thickly applied, separate strokes of the brush or palette knife. It is precisely their poiver that accords with the ordinary rural subjects of the Pontoise school and is therefore the st\'listic hallmark of these pictures. To whom were these village landscapes designed to appeal? Stylisti- cally, the rural imagery of the school of Pontoise derived loosely from the aesthetic of the Barbizon school and particularly that of Millet (see above, II and III/l). Any study of the market for Barbizon paintings during the 1860s and '70s, when the school of Pontoise was at its height, reveals clearly that they appealed strongly to the urban bourgeoisie not only of France, but, per- haps more importantly, of Britain and the United States. The number of rich businessmen who made their fortunes during the great age of industrial cap- italism and who surrounded themselves with paintings of villages and villag- ers is truly staggering. From Paris and Liverpool to Boston, New York, Chi- cago, and Minneapolis, the galleries of such men had more Barbizon paintings than Old Masters or even Salon nudes, and patrons of their type formed a market to which any aspiring young landscape painter might want quite naturally to appeal (see below, IV). The simple landscapes of Bar- bizon— filled with peasant figures, always obedient to the cycle of the sea- sons and the work of the fields — suited the atavistic tastes of many men whose fortunes were founded on railroads and industry. Yet, in spite of their evident interest in the marketing of their pictures (see below, IV), members of the school of Pontoise painted rural landscapes which have only superficial similarities to those of the Barbizon school that sold so well. Not only are the Pontoise paintings' surfaces more labored and difficult even than those of Millet's late pictures, but their subjects rarely have 180 A DA-I' IN THE COUNTRY TOSTOISE. -CMluu J« Si the easy charm so evident in works by their predecessors. Comparisons between contemporary paintings by Pissarro and Daubigny of similar sites make this point clearly. Pissarro's rural landscapes simply exist — strongly painted, confidently composed, and absolutely actual. His houses, for exam- ple, are powerful, not beautiful; one returns to Duret and his "power of the brush." It was the strength and the physicahty of rural nature that Pissarro understood and communicated so strongly to his friends, the other members of the school of Pontoise. They strove to paint rustic scenes with a directness and formal honesty unprecedented in the history of art. It is perhaps for this reason that their paintings, based upon the prevailing aesthetic of naturalism being practiced by so many writers following the lead of Zola, failed to appeal to the audience for Barbizon pictures which they also sought as theirs. It was, in the end, easier for a bourgeois to buy and read one of Zola's nov- els— crude as it might be — than to own and look repeatedly at a painting with so little finesse or charm. The novel could be fumed over and put aside; the painting could not. One last point must be made before discussing specific landscape paintings by the school of Pontoise. The works of art created by these men are not alike in every way. The two greatest painters of the group, the painters who really developed their art in the Pontoisian landscape, were Pissarro and Cezanne. Cezanne the Provencal spent less time in the landscape around Pontoise than did Pissarro. Indeed, while the older artist worked there with only a single interruption between 1866 and 1883, the younger one was there between 1873 and 1875 and again between 1879 and 1882. Yet the site played an equally important role in their developments. Cezanne began his career in Pontoise by copying a Louveciennes landscape by Pissarro." He rap- idly moved out-of-doors, however, disciplining his own impetuous and erotic sensibility by a rigorous study of rural nature. Even after comparing the land- scapes by Pissarro and Cezanne in this exhibition, one can tell that their sen- sibilities were utterly different — as different as those of Corot and Rousseau, for example. Cezanne submitted the landscape to rigorous structural and pictorial analysis, taking Duret's advice to Pissarro further than the critic intended it to be taken. Pissarro, the great socialist and humanist, perceived Pontoise and its environs not merely as a landscape qua landscape, but as a human environment, populated by humble rural workers, many of whom the Figs. 46-47. Pontoise. — Chateau de Saint- Martin; Pontoise. — Panorama ofl'Ermitage, c. 1890. Postcards. PISSARRO, CEZANNE, AND THE SCHOOL OF PONTOISE 181 Fig. 48. Pontoise. — Vieiv from the Auvers Path,c. 1890. Postcard. POSTOISH. - Vue yt.ic Je \t ^> painter knew and used as models. The village, for Pissarro, was at one with its inhabitants. For Cezanne, it was simply a group of buildings surrounded by hills and vegetation. Yet for each it was a pre-modern landscape, and for each it sustained repeated investigation and analysis. In fact, it was less Cezanne than Gauguin who derived not just his style, but a good deal of his iconography from the village landscapes of Pontoise and its environs. Gauguin painted extensively with Pissarro during the late 1870s and early '80s, particularly in 1883, when the latter moved to the village of Osny. Here, the two men painted fields, rural roads, cottages, and barnyards in manners so similar that — were it not for the presence of signatures and dates — many of their landscapes would be virtually indistin- guishable from one another. And, as if in homage to his master, Gauguin depicted village landscapes very much like those by Pissarro of Osny and Valhermay when he painted his own neighborhood in Paris in 1870 (no. 74) and even when he made his first, famous trip to Pont-Aven in Brittany in 1886 — in spite of the rugged wildness of that site and the constant presence of the sea (nos. 75—76). This fact alone shows the extent to which the rural Impressionism of the school of Pontoise made its impact upon the subsequent history of landscape painting in France. — R. B. Notes l.Brettell, 1977, pp. 22-69. 2. See Henriet, 1891. Other books hy this author are L'Ete du paysagiste (1866) and Le Pavsagiste anx champs il8T'6). 3. Pissarro and Venturi, 1939, p. 26. 4. See also Zola, 1959, pp. 128-129. In his 1868 review of the Salon Zola wrote of Pissarro's landscapes: "Nothing could have been more banal and nothing was more powerful. From ordinary truth, the temperament of this painter has fashioned a rare poem of life and of strength." 5. Compare Venturi 153 and Pissarro and Venturi 123. 182 A DA'l' IN THE COUNTR-l- 61. Camille Pissarro The Banks of the Oise, Pontoise (BURDS DF l'eAU A PoNlX^ISI-.), 1S72 Pissarro painted this superb river land- scape within months of his arrival in Pontoise from Louveciennes, and — with- out secure knowledge of the geography and architecture of Pontoise — one would almost think that it had been painted in Bougival. Both the composi- tion and the facture of the painting have direct antecedents in the river landscapes Pissarro had painted just months earlier in that modernizing and suburban land- scape on the Seine. In fact, as if in hom- age to Wash House at Bougival, his land- scape with a small factory on the Seine (no. 17), Pissarro chose to center the composition of The Banks of the Oise, Pontoise on the smokestack of the usine a gaz, or gasworks, in the town; the bridge crossing the river in the distance is the railroad bridge, which was less than a decade old in 1872. The path from which Pissarro painted this picture, the so-called chemin de la Pelouse, passed in front of the grounds of several recently built country residences, one of which, immediately to the left of Pissarro's com- position, was the property of the owner of the great Parisian department store Le Printemps. This was in every way a mod- ernized, suburban landscape. What is unusual about this painting in Pissarro's Pontoisian oeuvre is its very modernity. When he had painted the town and its environs in the late 1860s, his large landscapes, several of which were made for the Salon, were utterly ru- ral in character. This tendency character- ized most of the more than 300 land- scapes Pissarro painted in arid around Pontoise during the 1870s and early 1880s. However, during the years 1872 and 1873, just after his period in Louveciennes, Pissarro tended to paint the modernizing and suburban land- scape of Pontoise itself rather than the traditional, rural landscape that sur- rounded it. In this context. The Banks of the Oise, Pontoise is a suburban, rather than a village, landscape. Its composition and the unusual length of the canvas connect the picture to the river land- scapes of Daubigny (see above, III/5). However, Pissarro's frank acceptance of modern and industrial forms would not have been sanctioned by the older artist. who allowed such intrusions into his prints, but rarely into his paintings. 62. Camille Pissarro The Red House (La Maison rouge), 1873 This delicate, subtle painting was acquired, shortly after it was painted, by the great opera singer and collector of Impressionism Jean-Baptiste Faure (see below, IV). It is a study in balances — between old and new, earth and sky, man and nature. The red house of its title anchors the right half of the composi- tion, its newly built facade strictly par- allel to the picture plane and crying out for attention. This utterly modern dwell- ing is balanced by a considerably older farmhouse of a type common on the flat planes of the Vexin. The contrast of color, placement, and style is apparent, and the houses — representing two "ages" of man — vie for pictorial domi- nance on either side of a marvelous specimen fruit tree. The picture was painted from a path in the fields that ran alongside the route de Gisors, an old trading road from the fields of the Vexin into the market town of Pontoise. Pissarro could walk to the spot within ten minutes from his house in I'Ermitage. Undoubtedly he returned time after time to perfect this delicate painting. So carefully observed are the nuances of color in the fields and the sky, so perfectly detailed is its facture, that a short period en plein air would not have sufficed to complete it. Pissarro, like his friend Sisley, was struggling through the medium of paint to understand the dif- ficult transitions into modernity being experienced even in rural places. 63—64. Camille Pissarro Hillside in the Hermitage, Pontoise (COTEAU DE l'hERMITAGE, PoNTOISe), 1873 Snow at the Hermitage, Pontoise (EfEET DE NEICE A L HERMITAGE, Pontoise), 1874 These two landscapes, painted in successive years in I'Ermitage, are studies of the effect of the seasons and weather upon a single landscape composition. Such "pairings" are common in the oeu- vres of both Pissarro and Sisley, who of- PISSARRO. CEZANNE, AND THE SCHOOL OF PONTOISE 183 ten returned to a landscape one or two years after they first had painted it. In such cases they chose to retain a particu- larly effective view or composition so that their attention could be directed completely to the accurate entrapment of color and atmosphere. There is no evi- dence that these pairs were ever exhib- ited together, and many of them are dif- ferent enough to suggest that they were conceived as independent easel pictures rather than as part of an ongoing series or group of landscapes. None of them were ever sold together. This pair, exhib- ited together for the first time, gives the viewer the opportunity to analyze the many shifts that Pissarro made in the landscape to suit the demands of each picture. These landscapes represent a group of small seventeenth- or eighteenth-cen- tury rural dwellings huddled alongside a hill, the Cote des Grouettes, in I'Ermitage (fig. 42). When he painted these landscapes, Pissarro lived in a newly constructed house on the rue de I'Ermitage, a modern, paved street in the same hamlet (see above, III/5). This street ran almost parallel to an older, curved path called the fond de I'Ermitage, along which the houses depicted in these paintings were located. It is interesting that Pissarro painted these older dwellings many more times during the 1860s and '70s than he did buildings on the larger, newer street, thereby indicating a pictorial preference for what one might call a traditional vil- lage landscape. The old man in the ear- lier Hillside in the Herjnitage, Pontoise, his back bent from years of work, is a fig- ure who transcends time as he works in his kitchen garden. Only the large beige facade of the Chateau des Mathurins, then owned by Pissarro's friend the radi- cal feminist author Marie Desraimes, peeks into the landscapes from the upper right corner and gives the barest hint of modernity to these rural views (see above, II). 65. Camille Pissarro The Ennery Road near Pontoise (Route d'Ennery pres Pontoise), 1874 The rue de I'Ermitage ran from the Oise until it merged with the road to Ennery, a small village about eight kilometers from Pontoise. This road was particularly beautiful and tranquil because it was a secondary route without much traffic and because it wound through a pictur- esque and forested valley before climbing the hill to the plains of the Vexin on which Ennery was situated. Pissarro's other paintings made on the same road in the early and mid-1870s all represent the section of the road closest to I'Ermitage before the more beautiful, forested area began. ^ The Ennery Road near Pontoise is almost strictly geometrical in concep- tion, each angled line balanced by another, each plane of color neatly delin- eated. Unlike all of Pissarro's other views of this road, the parallel construction of the painting allows the viewer no entrance, and it possesses a quality of transitoriness. Yet in spite of Pissarro's evident fascination with the transitory — and hence modern — quality of this land- scape, it is strictly traditional in subject. The horse cart is a simple rural wagon of a type used in France for several cen- turies before this painting was made, and the pedestrians are not vacationing promenaders, but peasants or rural workers coming from and going to the fields. The "time" of the painting is slow and continuous and has little of the dis- connected, random, and nervous quality of urban time as expressed in contem- porary paintings by Monet, Degas, and Manet (see above, III/3). It is interesting to note, however, that this road had recently been rebuilt and improved, un- doubtedly to the design of a government engineer from Paris, when Pissarro chose to paint it. Note 1. Pissarro and Venturi 212, 304, 307, 351, 385, 397,402,411. 66. Camille Pissarro Climbing Path in the Hermitage, Pontoise (Le Chemin montant l'hermitage, Pontoise), 1875 Climbing in the Hermitage, Potitoise is among the most original and accom- plished landscapes by Pissarro. Painted from a point midway up a steep footpath on the Cote des Boeufs (no. 67), it repre- sents the brightly tiled rooftops of the ru- ral dwellings in I'Ermitage. Again, as was so often the case with Pissarro, the painting was executed less than five min- utes away from his home, so that he could transport it back and forth with ease whenever his mood or the con- ditions of light and weather permitted. Pissarro derived the style and point of view of this painting from the slightly earlier Auvers landscapes by Cezanne (for example, Auvers, Panoramic View [no. 69], and seems, in turn, to have had a profound influence on Cezanne, who turned countless times in his later career to the interaction of planes of foliage and distant groups of vernacular buildings. Traditional dwellings in this region of France were made of rough stones and roofed with wood or, more frequently, thatch. These dwellings, called "chaumieres," were painted many times by Pissarro and Cezanne; the most fam- ous example is the House of the Hanged Man (1873-74; Musee du Louvre, Paris) by Cezanne. These dwellings, the norm for the region even in the early nineteenth century, either were being replaced or improved in the mid- and later 1800s, and in Pissarro's day it was becoming increasingly difficult to find a concentrated group of authentic, tradi- tional rural dwellings. The newer houses were covered with smooth white or cream-colored stucco, had regularly hung doors and windows, and were roofed with brightly colored tile. In this way they were the opposite of the earth- toned and irregular dwellings of the past, houses which tended to merge with the landscape. The new dwellings domi- nated their surroundings both in color and shape; their geometric regularity and brilliance appealed to three generations of French landscape painters. Here, Pissarro, as had Cezanne before him, chose a viewpoint looking down on the strident, seemingly floating planes of the tiled roofs, described as "playing cards" in a letter Cezanne was to write to the older artist from Provence in 1876.^ Note 1. Cezanne, 1941, p. 102, no. 34. 67. Camille Pissarro Red Roofs, a Corner of the Village IN Winter (Les Toits rouges, coin de village, EFFET d'hIVEr), 1877 Painted late in the winter of 1876—77, this picture represents a group of eigh- 184 A DAY IN THE COUNTRY No. 61. Camille Pissarro The Banks of the Oise, Pontoise, 1872 (detail on pp. 14-15) PISSARRO, CEZANNE, AND THE SCHOOL OF PONTOISE 185 /^■^ .^^ '%^. (i '.ii- " W